


I'm Sorry, Thank You,  I Love You

by Thunar



Category: DRAMAtical Murder (Visual Novel), DRAMAtical Murder - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Basically Vitri's Bad End But With Noiz Instead, Catatonic Noiz, Here we go, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kidnapping, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Child Abuse, Psychological Torture, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Sexual Content, Sexual Slavery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-11-17
Packaged: 2018-08-08 16:53:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 44,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7765765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thunar/pseuds/Thunar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been a year since Noiz was taken.  After enduring months of relentless torture and humiliation, his captors suddenly release him -or at least whats left of him.  At this point it's questionable whether there's anyone at all behind those dead eyes. Aoba, Koujaku, and Mizuki struggle to help him recover, but it's hard to fix one broken person when you all start to fall apart.</p><p>I sold part of my soul to a prince of hell for this fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Substitute

**Author's Note:**

> This work IS NOT MINE, I only commissioned it. The author asked if I could post it on my account.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taken Broken Returned

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ACT I: The Brother

It’s a Saturday night.

It’s a Saturday night and you’re playing cards with Mizuki and Koujaku in your room. They’re drunk and you’re getting there, but it’s a Saturday night when you get the first message.

Koujaku is red-faced and happier than you’ve seen him in a while. For as big as he is – for as Koujaku as he is – he’s surprisingly bad at holding his liquor. Almost as bad as you. He’s had a few shots and some beers but he’s giggling from the tip of his teeth and getting progressively worse at cards. He’s also getting progressively worse at cheating. You swat him away from your fingertips every time he leans over to peek and he chortles every time.

Mizuki is a little harder to read. He actually gets more reserved when he’s drunk, but certainly not less playful. He stares you down and smiles, his lips closed and eyes scanning your face for any sort of emotion that he can take advantage of. He’s an intimidating drunk, and that pisses you off. He told you not that long ago when you visited in the hospital that you were an annoying drunk and that only served to encourage you to drink more in front of him. You’ll annoy him. Oh yeah. You’ll annoy him.

 It’s a Saturday night when you get the first dick pic.

It’s from an unknown number and you aren’t expecting it so you react a bit more violently than you want to. Koujaku and Mizuki both ask to see what it is, and when Koujaku retches at the sight, you tell him it serves him right from grabbing your Coil from you without your permission.

“It’s some random dick pic,” you tell Mizuki as he grabs it from Koujaku in curiosity. “I get these sometimes, always from different numbers. I just block them. Ignore it.”

But his eyes glaze over. He furrows his brows and stares at the picture a bit longer than you’d expect him to, even if he’s interested in the dick himself.

“What?” you ask. “You wanna text them back from your number? See if they’re down?”

Koujaku snickers but Mizuki doesn’t budge. You’re a little concerned because he doesn’t tend to let an insult go by unchallenged. But he doesn’t say a word as he hands your Coil back to you.

“What’s wrong?” Koujaku presses. Mizuki shakes his head and throws another card down on the table.

“Nothing,” he shrugs.

“Want me to send you it?” you ask, again hoping that your taunts will provoke a reaction. They don’t. He shakes his head and Koujaku raises his eyebrows in confusion as you awkwardly get back to your game.

“So… Aoba,” Koujaku asks a few minutes later as he organizes his cards precariously. “How much longer do you think you’ll be living here?”

You roll your eyes. Mizuki looks at you in confusion.

“I take care of granny,” you remind him. “I’m not moving in with you.”

“More like Tae-san takes care of you,” he chides with a smirk. You glare at him. He’s been on your case to move in with him for a few months now. You don’t know where it came from or why he cares.

“So what if she does?” you ask. “Just because you can’t cook doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take advantage of my grandmother’s cooking.”

“I can cook!” Koujaku cries, slapping his cards face-up against the table. Mizuki groans in frustration as he collects everyone’s cards and shuffles to deal again. “And if you lived with me, I’d cook for you.”

“I’d rather not die of poisoning,” you tell him, and before he can respond, your Coil goes off again.

“Tell me it’s another one,” Mizuki grins. “Aoba’s getting mystery dick pictures.”

“I told you, I get these a lot,” you say, flipping your Coil up. Sure enough, it’s from a number you don’t recognize. You don’t open it right away. “Well, not a lot. But I’m sure it’s just some random people from – ah… a while ago.”

From when you used to go by Sly Blue and decimate people in Rhyme. Koujaku and Mizuki can gather that probably. You don’t really want to say it out loud.

“I guess I was kind of a tease,” you mutter under your breath and check the message. There it is. A dick. You flip it around for your friends to see. “I guess some guys are still pissed about it.”

Koujaku recoils once again. You’re not surprised. Koujaku seems to have some issues when it comes to other guys recently. Not that you’re exactly in love with getting pictures of random cocks, but you’ve never been into guys… really. Koujaku has been getting increasingly flustered by the mention of other guys’ sex lives, including yours and Mizuki’s. You roll your eyes over to share a look of frustration with Mizuki, but he’s staring at your Coil. He’s transfixed. His eyes are glazed over and his mouth is parted slightly, like he’s looking at something particularly delicious but frightened by it at the same time. A scary donut, perhaps?

“Hey, are y—”

“Give me it.”

He snatches your Coil from you and starts to text back.

“What are you doing?!” you cry, reaching over and snatching it back before he can do anything stupid. All he has typed so far is, “What are yo,” and you delete it from your screen.

“I just want to text them back.”

“Text them from your own Coil!” you shout. “I don’t want them to think I want more of these kinds of pictures!”

Mizuki’s eyes flutter up to yours and hold your gaze. He looks… sad. He’s staring at you in actual, genuine grief and you have no idea why. Your eyebrows go from furrowed to slanted as your anger gives way to confusion. Why is your friend so sad?

“Mizuki, what’s wrong?”

You expect an answer right away, but he doesn’t give you one.

In fact, he doesn’t answer at all.

He tears his eyes from you and blinks a couple of times, looking out the window for just one second before he looks back down to the cards in his hands. He starts to deal them again and Koujaku has to tug on your sleeve to sit down after a few more moments. You’re both extremely confused but continue playing in an awkward silent.

 It’s four minutes later when your Coil goes off again.

You all react in different ways, but you all seem just as exasperated as each other. Koujaku groans from the back of his throat, disgusted and annoyed; Mizuki closes his eyes slowly and lowers his cards to the table as he nods his head down to face the floor. You tip your head up in frustration and promise yourself to throw your Coil off the veranda if it’s the same number.  
It is.

“To be honest with you, this is more than usual,” you tell them. You pull the message up and there’s another dick. Well, it’s the same dick. You can tell because there are piercings all over it. But it’s here again, and you’re about to silence your Coil and shove it under the table when Mizuki’s arm slinks silently across the table. He opens up his fingers and gently pushes his palm at you. He wants to see the picture and something tells you it’s not because he’s horny.

You look at Koujaku, who shrugs at you. He nods at Mizuki’s hand so you put your Coil into it and Mizuki pulls it back in and takes his time turning it toward himself to see the screen.

“Mizuki, what are you doing?” you ask sternly. “What’s wrong?”

He takes a deep, labored breath. He doesn’t look up from the Coil.

“This is Noiz,” he says. Koujaku gasps. You’re sure you didn’t hear him correctly, but then he repeats: “This is Noiz texting you.”

You wince.

Oh no.

You look at Koujaku in despair.

You both thought Mizuki was over this.

 Noiz has been gone for a year. He left just after Oval Tower fell. In fact, Oval Tower fell, and no one ever saw him again. At first you thought he was dead, but Mizuki got a little obsessive about finding information out about him. He’d said there was no body so there was no proof. No one else died in the collapse and it just didn’t add up. Then he got wind from another Rib team that Ruff Rabbit’s leader had gotten in contact with his second-in-command and told him to disband the team, that he was gone, and not coming back.

Mizuki had kind of been a wreck. From what you understood, he had just been getting close to Noiz.

Close enough to recognize him from a photo of his dick, at least.

 “Mizuki…”

The tone of Koujaku’s voice implies that he’s going to deny it, but Mizuki shakes his head.

“This is him,” he says. “I know it’s him. How many white guys with pierced dicks do you know?”

“He’s only half white,” Koujaku shrugs and Mizuki shoots him the meanest glare you’ve ever seen. You didn’t know Mizuki was capable of looking so angry. Koujaku throws his hands up defensively and you finally open your mouth:

“I’m sure it’s not him, Mizuki.” The Coil goes off again in the middle of your sentence. “He was a punk but he wasn’t… he wouldn’t do something like that.” Mizuki checks the message. “He wouldn’t leave for a year and then start sexting your best fri –”

Mizuki turns the Coil screen to you, his elbow thumping loudly against the table as he slams it down.

It’s Noiz. He’s naked, his hands tied together above his head and to a bedframe. It’s so explicit that you cover your mouth to keep from dry heaving. There’s semen all over his chest and stomach and fear in his eyes. So much fear. So much that it’s the first thing you notice. Koujaku turns to look and does the same as you: covers his hand with his mouth and crooks one eyebrow in absolute shock.

“That’s disgusting,” he whispers. He’s not insulting Noiz. He doesn’t mean that Noiz is disgusting. He knows as well as you do that there’s something bigger going on here.

“You’re right,” Mizuki says finally, his eyes still piercing into your own. He tosses your Coil back to you. “Noiz would never do something like this to me.” You pull your hand away from your lips as Mizuki says the words that will haunt you from this day forward: “Someone else is doing this to him.”

“Do you think… it’s… consensual?”

You and Mizuki both turn to Koujaku so quickly you’re surprised your necks don’t snap. Of course it was running through your minds but Koujaku just says it so… ably. As if the mere thought doesn’t terrify him to the point of muteness. Mizuki sneers.

“Why the fuck would you ask that?”

“Well, look at it,” Koujaku shrugs. You shake your head.

“We should call the police,” you say, pulling up the dial pad on your Coil. Mizuki reaches over to cover up the screen.

“No,” he says gruffly. “They’re not gonna help. We need to trace the call.”

“You always say that but Akushima is not the only cop in this town,” Koujaku says, his voice straddling the line of sobriety and frustration. “And even if he is, he’s not gonna let a missing person get raped just because you’ve egged his car a few times.”

“What the fuck?!” Mizuki cries, reaching over the table to take a swing at Koujaku. You shout at him to get back but Koujaku blocks his punch with his forearm and pushes him away.

“What?! What the hell is your problem?!”

“How can you just say that?” Mizuki shouts at him, voice echoing in your tiny room. “How can you be so casual that something like this is happening to Noiz? No, I know, don’t answer. Because you always hated him.”

“Whoa,” Koujaku yells. “He was an annoying little shit but I don’t think he deserves to be – I don’t think he deserves to have bad stuff happen to him.”

“We need to calm down and do something because fighting with each other isn’t going to help Noiz.” You, as always, have to be the voice of reason. Your friends stare at each other a moment longer before they both seem to calm down and Mizuki nods over at you.

“The police aren’t gonna help find him. If we’re getting pictures of him tonight, that means whoever has him is going to do something even worse tonight. They’re not going to start a search party at eleven thirty.”

You roll your eyes.

“Even if any of that is true, what do you propose we do about it?”

“Track the number,” Mizuki shrugs, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the word. You squint at him.

“Track the number, because we’re in some sci-fi movie with unrealistic technology and I can just track this number like that.” You laugh. “How do we track a number? Even if we find out who it belongs to, how do we found out where they are?”

Mizuki reaches over the table and snatches your Coil away from you again. You let him take it with a loud sigh and look at Koujaku for help. He seems to have checked out already: his arms are crossed over his chest and he refuses to look at Noiz. You shake your head.

“There has to be something that can trace the number. How does 119 do it?”

“I don’t know, Mizuki, but we’re not 119.” You sit back and start to rub your forehead with your fingertips. “We’re just a bunch of guys getting drunk on a Saturday night playing cards.”

“There’s nothing?” he asks. “Nothing at like, Heibon? No kind of… tracking software?”

Your head springs up immediately.

“Actually.”

 

Koujaku shouts that you should be calling the police as the three of you sprint to Heibon. He and Mizuki have sobered up a bit mentally, but physically they’re both still a bit slow. Koujaku is better at keeping it together – probably because he never cared for Noiz in the first place. But Mizuki is slowly losing his mind. And in all honesty, so are you.

Noiz was a little punk, the emphasis though being on the little. He annoyed the hell out of you and you could never understand what he was thinking. His thought process – his logic – was so bizarre to you that you stopped trying to guess what he’d do next. You had written him off as an annoying teenager who thought he was cooler than he was, who wanted to be an adult but didn’t know how to be, and didn’t understand that you were never, ever going to Rhyme him. He never tried to kiss you again after that time in Heibon, but that one kiss had already sealed his fate as far as you were concerned: annoying, trouble, brat. Not the worst person you’d ever known, but maybe in a few years he’d be a little more tolerable.

Then you found out about his condition.

He actually told you straight-out; he didn’t beat around the bush or drag it on forever. He cut his palm on some glass and you reacted to the pain more than he did. He noticed your wince, your squint, your gasp through clenched teeth as you watched the blood trickle down his hand and onto the carpet. He noticed your reaction and then tried to mimic it. He seethed too, and then flinched, just one moment too late. You asked him what he was doing and he told you: pretending that it hurts, because it doesn’t. Nothing hurts. Nothing has ever hurt.

He said his family couldn’t do much about it; it was incurable and he was sick of feeling like he’d hurt people so he ran away from home. You told him that his family must miss him terribly and he nodded, noting that he’d like to see his little brother again but it would have to wait for now. You bandaged him up and noticed he was not the same after that: he was a little quieter, a little more down to earth. He had a vulnerability hangover you suppose. But you can’t say you weren’t a little relieved. He became easier to be around and you suddenly felt responsible for his wellbeing. You don’t know why. He never asked you to. But he mentioned his little brother and that’s when it clicked: you needed to care for him like he was your little brother. Which was always a little odd since he hit on you constantly, but all you had to do was roll your eyes and poke him in the nose and he’d settle down.

He seemed to actually like being taken care of. Of course, you never did it too obviously.

You regret that now.

 When he disappeared, you were a little perplexed. You’d thought he and Mizuki were close to dating and if not, you always thought that you had a certain sort of relationship with him. You always thought you deserved more than a sudden disappearance, but if you’d been misreading the relationship the whole time, then so be it. You were hurt, but didn’t want anyone to know it. You wrote it off as a youthful indiscretion, a kid no longer interested in Rhyme or Midorijima and moving on to something bigger and better. You wrote it off as that, even if you knew, deep, deep down, that wasn’t it. Noiz wasn’t that kind of person.

Mizuki knew that too. Mizuki never believed he just ran away. Koujaku is still in the process of convincing Mizuki that Noiz is gone forever, yet… here he is.

“This one is a video,” Mizuki says as you’re scouring the backroom of Heibon for the tracking software. You turn to him immediately.

“Koujaku,” you say sternly. “Give it to Koujaku.”

Koujaku is sitting on the couch, trying not to throw up. He lifts his head up and stares at you quizzically and you have to rely on your decades of friendship to get your point across without saying another word. You give him your best, “You know Mizuki can’t watch this because if it’s something bad it will traumatize him for life, now go watch the fucking video you absolute hippo” look and he nods at you. You sort of hate that he knows you so well but he gets up nonetheless and takes the Coil from Mizuki, who lets it go without a fight.

“But I need to see it,” he protests, his voice shaking, as if he doesn’t really believe his own words. Koujaku shrugs him off.

“I’ll see it first,” he says, switching the volume off. “Then I’ll let you see it, okay?”

Mizuki doesn’t reply. You stand rooted to your spot, a giant computer fan dangling in your grip.

Drunk Koujaku doesn’t have nearly as good a poker face as Mizuki.

“Ah, Jesus,” he mutters, blinking slowly and turning away from the Coil. You take in a sharp breath.

“What is it?” Mizuki asks, moving toward him. Koujaku pulls the Coil away from him. “Is he okay? Is he alive?”

“He’s fine,” Koujaku says. “Just… way more of Noiz than I ever wanted to see.”

You grunt in frustration.

“But he’s okay?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“Just…” Koujaku shrugs and holds the Coil high up in the air, away from Mizuki, the way a big brother would do. You feel a tug in your chest. “Sex stuff.”

“What sex stuff?” Mizuki asks. He’s on the verge of tears.

“I don’t know man, just… not stuff that I think you should be jealous about. This doesn’t look…”

Koujaku pretends he’s searching for the word, but you both know he’s not. He knows the word. He just doesn’t want to say it. He’s said it once already tonight, and he’s not going to say it again.

“Look, I think we should just go to the police,” he says, finally relenting and handing Mizuki the Coil. You don’t try to stop him. Mizuki takes it frenziedly and turns around to watch the video in horror. “They’re going to be able to do way more than we can.”

“You go,” you tell him pointedly. “We’ll stay here and try to find him ourselves.”

Koujaku blinks at you dumbly. His face goes expressionless as you stare him down, daring to argue you on this. He can go. He can go file a report with the police, and they can do what they can while you and Mizuki stay behind and do what you can.

You’ve come to agree with Mizuki. If you want to find Noiz tonight, you’re going to have to find him yourselves.

And you are going to find Noiz tonight.

You just have to find the software first.

 “This isn’t recent.”

Mizuki’s voice fills the room. You and Koujaku both turn to him sharply.

“What?”

“This isn’t a recent video,” he says, his voice turning shaky again. “Look. There’s blue on the tip of his hair. We did that. We dyed some of his hair blue. A year ago. If this was from tonight, it would be out by now.”

Koujaku frowns and takes the Coil back to watch the video again. You don’t think you can stomach it, so you’ll take their word for it.

“He does have blue tips but that could mean anything. If this was a year old, what does that mean?”

“It means he didn’t run away,” Mizuki says. His entire body seems to be vibrating. He can’t sit still and your eyes are glued to him because you can’t seem to move. “It means someone took him after Oval Tower fell and now they have him and they’ve had him for a year and now they’re sending us these fucking disgusting things. God, oh my God, they’ve been doing stuff like this to him for a year and I’ve been moping around like he just left, I should have known he didn’t just leave and now he’s out there in trouble somewhere?” Mizuki has his hands in his hair now as he starts to pace, every bit the image of a man in the middle of a breakdown. Koujaku rushes to him immediately but he rejects his advance with a broad wave of his arm. “He’s just out there and I don’t know where he is and no one else cares!”

“Hey!” you shout angrily, waving the fan in the air. “I’m the one who brought us here, aren’t I?”

“I care,” Koujaku adds indignantly. “I didn’t like him but this is messed up.”

“Then do something! Both of you!” Mizuki screams.

You hurl the fan at him before you can stop yourself.

“I’m trying!” you shout back. “You’re the one standing there screaming instead of doing something productive!”

“Something productive?” Mizuki screeches. “Really productive, not finding this miracle software that will track this sadist. We need to call this number and demand him Noiz back!”

“That’s a bad idea,” you tell him, pointing your finger at him violently. “They might not answer. They might stop altogether. We need them to keep contacting us.”

Koujaku takes a long, loud breath and you look over to him. He’s wincing at you and you cock your head to the side. 

“I just – that’s logical, but I don’t think there’s any logic to this. If they’re sending us videos then they want us to know this is happening. I don’t think they’re scared. I think it’s a game.”

It’s a game. Something about that sends chills down your spine and it’s all the encouragement Mizuki needs. He nods at his friend and then at you and dials the number. You can’t move as the screen pops up and ringer starts. It’s a game. Someone’s playing a game with you. Someone has brought doing terrible things to Noiz, possibly for the past year, into a game. They’ve made a game out of this. You feel like you know someone who would do that, but you can’t figure out who.

Then, to your – relief? surprise? terror? – someone actually picks up.

 

“ _I was wondering when you’d call._ ”

 

Mizuki starts to shout immediately but you’re not entirely sure what he’s saying because you react so viscerally to the voice that speaks. Everything becomes cloudy. You’re wracking your brain trying to place that voice, but nothing’s coming up. You know that voice. You know it well, in fact. You just – have – to place it –

“ _Your friend is fine,_ ” he says.

You look at Mizuki and roll your pointer in a circlular motion, indicating to him to keep the person talking.

“What – what did you do to him?”

“ _I don’t think you’d like to know._ ”

Mizuki’s face falls. He looks up at you, eyes wide and mouth open, and seems to lose control of his body as he slumps down to the floor. He turns away as he falls to his knees.

“Where is he? Give him back,” he says, his body finally giving over to the misery. He starts to cry. Koujaku has to look away. You feel empty inside. You feel completely empty. You feel – you feel like Noiz: you can’t feel anything.

“ _We plan on it,_ ” the man says, causing Mizuki’s head to perk up. “ _Ah, but – you aren’t Aoba-san, are you?_ ”

_Aoba-san._

Your brain places it.

You rush to Mizuki, barreling him over in your frantic effort to get to your Coil.

“Virus!” you bark. “Where are you?! Where _are_ you?!”

 

There’s a ringing in your ears. It feels like there’s a film over your vision; everything else happens in a filter of confusion and panic-turned-calm. It’s as if your anxiety reaches a fever pitch and gives way to complete serenity. Virus gives you an address and Mizuki takes off, sprinting down the road. Koujaku follows behind him but you stay on the line with Virus until he hangs up. He tells you that he and Trip had finally found someone just as interesting as you and just wanted to play with him for a while. You can’t respond. Your mouth is dry and your throat is closed and you gasp for air and you worry that with Koujaku and Mizuki gone, you might get snatched up next. You feel like he’s right behind you and you have to rush out onto the street, gasping for air, scanning the area for other people – strangers, just anyone who will notice if you get kidnapped next. You hold your head in your hand for a few seconds before you tear down the street after Koujaku, heading to the address that Virus gave you.

Mizuki is already there when you arrive and you feel nothing.

He’s carrying Noiz bridal style out of a building. A t-shirt much too large for him drapes over his frame, but you can’t tell if it’s too big because it’s a giant shirt or because Noiz has suddenly become half the size you remember him as. You suck in a deep breath as you realize it’s probably both – it’s Trip’s shirt. And Noiz has lost weight.

His eyes are open when Mizuki lays him down gently on some grass. You lick your lips and stare at him. You want to be happy – his eyes are open. That means he’s alive. But his eyes look dead. Empty. If he’s alive, he’s only just. He isn’t happy to see Mizuki.

 

He doesn’t even seem to know who Mizuki is.

 

Koujaku stands off to the side as you kneel down next to Noiz. Mizuki’s face is streaked with tears and his eyes are redder than they were when he was drunk. He can hardly breathe without sobbing and you motion for Koujaku to come take him away. When you’re alone with Noiz, you sit him up, but he falls back down.

“Sit up, Noiz, we’re here now,” you tell his limp body. You pull his arms up again but he bends at the waist for only a few moments before he goes crashing to the ground again. You shake your head in disbelief.

“Stop dropping him!” Mizuki shouts. You look over at him. Koujaku’s arms cage him in, keeping him from taking off back to Noiz. He’s struggling but just barely. You shrug at him.

“I’m not dropping him, he’s falling,” you say. You get onto your hands and knees and crawl next to him. “Noiz? Do you hear me?”

 Koujaku is the one who finally calls the hospital. An ambulance shows up, loud and bright and gives you a headache within seconds. You’ve always been susceptible to headaches.

“We were getting… pretty bad videos,” Koujaku is telling a police officer. Noiz is on a stretcher. It’s all so surreal that you’ve lost the ability to talk. “On this Coil, here. You can watch them but… they’re bad. I guess it was some Yakuza creeps. They’re probably on a different continent by now.”

 Virus and Trip. They were your friends. They disappeared the same time Noiz did, but you never put it together. You didn’t exactly miss them like you missed Noiz. Virus’s words ring in your ears: “We finally found someone as interesting as you.” As interesting as you?

Could this have been you?

They were always sort of obsessed with you, but you thought they were just weird guys. They could cross the line into creepy on occasion, but they never scared you. You didn’t know they were capable of this.

 Mizuki is sitting cross-legged on the wet grass, his head in his hands and he stares at the ground and mutters to himself. He looks as traumatized as Noiz. Someone puts a shock blanket around him and he doesn’t even seem to notice.

Koujaku calls a cab but Mizuki insists that he get to go in the ambulance with Noiz. You don’t protest but somehow he ends up in the cab with you anyway. The drive over is silent, save for Mizuki’s sobs. The cab driver looks a little uneasy but Koujaku gives him a big tip and you find yourself in a waiting room eventually, staring at Mizuki who’s fallen asleep in a chair across from you. His cheeks are still wet. You can actually see the stains of tears he never wiped away.

Koujaku puts an arm around you.

“Take a nap,” he says quietly. His kimono is soft under your skin. “Even if we all fall asleep, they’ll wake us up if something happens.”

You realize that he’s right and start to close your eyes. As you fall asleep, you realize Noiz wouldn’t be able to feel how soft Koujaku is. He wouldn’t be able to feel anything.


	2. Catatonia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Recover Relocate Relapse

You don’t exactly remember much from your own stay in the hospital years ago, but you don’t know if that’s because it didn’t leave an impression on you or because you’ve so successfully erased it from your mind. It was a bad time – embarrassing more than painful. You don’t really want to remember it. You don’t want to remember what you did to get into the hospital, either.

But as it is, this isn’t the first time you’ve been in a hospital room with your grandmother at your side. The difference this time is that you’re not the one in the bed.

Mizuki’s stint in the hospital is too recent. He’s unable to come visit often without compromising his own mental health and Koujaku was never Noiz’s favorite person in the first place, so it’s mostly left to you to come look after Noiz on a daily basis. Well, you don’t so much look after him – the nurses and doctors do that, obviously. You just make sure he knows you’re there. You make sure he knows you’ll always be there. You always have been. Not a single day has gone by that you haven’t come to see him. Sometimes Mizuki and Koujaku are with you, sometimes not. But you’re always there.

And so is granny.

She talks to the nurses to better figure out Noiz’s condition since, after all, he’ll be discharged into your care when he leaves here, since he has no other family. They asked if that was okay and even though you knew you couldn’t really say no if you wanted to, you didn’t want to. Granny looked at you curiously when they mentioned it and you simply nodded in affirmation. “He’ll be going home with you?” “Of course.”

He’s your little brother. Of course he’s discharged into the care of his family.

You put yourself down as his next of kin and somehow Granny manages to pull enough strings to make it stick. As far as the hospital is concerned, Noiz is your blood relation. And that’s when it becomes official. You have the little brother you never wanted.

Mizuki pulls the chair right up to the edge of Noiz’s bed when he visits. He holds his hand and rests his head on his shoulder. He doesn’t say a word to him, but he almost always ends up crying. Koujaku stands in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest and stares at the floor silently, busying himself mostly with taking care of the other visitors rather than Noiz. Granny moves around the room with some sort of elderly wisdom that you envy; she knows exactly what she’s doing and all you can do is try to speak to him. It’s what you think to do. Get him to say something.

He never does.

They say his physical system is being stimulated – he registers that people come and go, he notices the lights are off, he can tell that people are crying or laughing or yelling. He simply can’t react. Or doesn’t.

They tell you that means it’s probably psychological. Physically, he’s been getting healthier. He’s been putting on weight through an IV and has even started to eat when fed manually. The color has come back to his skin and his hair is growing in thicker again. His heart is healthy and his system is working. His body is back. But he isn’t.

 

They have to discharge him. There’s nothing else they can do to help him. Mizuki starts a fund to pay his thirty percent of the hospital bill and fights to have him come live with him instead of you, but Granny takes control of the situation.

“He’s living with Koujaku.”

You all look at her in confusion when she says it. If Noiz were there, you imagine it would have shocked his system enough to react, too.

“Why me?” Koujaku asks, his voice quavering between anger and fright. He knows better than to defy Tae-san, but you’re sure he isn’t exactly excited about the idea of having Noiz stay with him at his place.

“It’s biggest and it’s closest to the hospital. It’s also most central to the rest of us. You have an extra room and a bathroom that isn’t attached to your bedroom. He’ll have his own space and still be taken care of. He’s staying with you.”

Koujaku takes a deep breath as his eyes flutter away from everyone in irritation. Mizuki’s scowling but he too knows better than to start a debate. Noiz is discharged the next day and Koujaku doesn’t say a word and the four of you set him up in his spare room.

In fact, none of you really say anything. Granny instructs you but otherwise you’re all fairly silent. Noiz can’t move on his own – can’t or won’t – and none of you can seem to recall how this all started. Two months ago, you were playing cards in your bedroom. Now you’re learning how to feed a twenty-year-old man so that he doesn’t starve to death.

Koujaku doesn’t wince or whimper when Granny shows him how to help Noiz to the bathroom or to the bath. He doesn’t complain that he’ll have to wipe his ass or strip him naked to clean him. He doesn’t protest when he learns how to massage his jaw open to eat or how to lift him from his bed to the wheelchair. He doesn’t say no when Granny tells him to stay in the same room as him at all times other than an hour before bed and he doesn’t mind that Noiz will be invading his alone time in front of the TV. Koujaku is stoic as usual, and doesn’t seem to register how difficult this is going to be.

Maybe it’s because he knows Mizuki isn’t going to be going home any time soon.

“You have to go home to sleep in your own bed sometime,” you tell him but Mizuki doesn’t want to hear it.

“No, I don’t,” he says. “I can sleep on Koujaku’s couch. I’ll sleep on the floor in Noiz’s room if I have to.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. We have the baby monitor in there. I think we need to give him his space at night.”

“Then I’ll sleep on Koujaku’s floor.”

Mizuki has become a different person.

You suppose you all have. This is the sort of thing that changes you.

 

The first two days go by smoothly. On the third day, Koujaku has to call you at work because Noiz is refusing to eat, even for Mizuki. You apologize to Haga-san and head over as quickly as you can, your heart racing the whole time. You don’t know if you can help. You don’t know if you’re ready for this kind of responsibility. This is like taking care of a child. Only there are three parents and none of them know what they’re doing.

“No matter how much I… rub,” Koujaku says, pointing at Noiz’s face and whispering quietly. “Nothing. I massage his jaw, he won’t open. It’s been working but it’s not working right now.”

“Has he done anything?”

“No,” Mizuki moans, sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, his head hanging low between his arms as he stares at the floor. “Still nothing. No reaction to anyone or anything. Nothing. It’s like he doesn’t even know who I am.”

“He doesn’t know who any of us are,” Koujaku says. You shake your head.

“He knows who we are,” you tell them. You look over at the boy sitting in the chair at the head of the table. It’s Noiz. It’s Noiz as you’ve always recognized him: blond and scrawny and in a big t-shirt and shorts.

He’s sitting up straight, staring at the table. But he can hear you. The doctors said he can. He can hear you what you’re saying and he can register the information. He just can’t seem to respond.

“He knows us,” you repeat. “He just can’t tell us that.”

You take a few steps toward and then stop in front of him. He’s so empty. He’s so empty and all you can think about is Virus and Trip. You grit your teeth to stymie your anger and clench your hands into fists. There’s no point in thinking about them now. There’s no point in thinking about them at all. They’re gone now. The police are searching but you know they’ll never find them. They’ve left the country. They’ve left the country and they’ve left Noiz. They’ve left Noiz like this – in this condition – practically at your doorstep. They broke Noiz and now you’re here to pick up the pieces.

Imagining the several violent ways you’d like to murder them both isn’t going to help Noiz get better.

It makes _you_ feel a little better, though.

You sit down in the chair next to Noiz and put your hand on top of his. Mizuki picks his head up to watch and you squeeze Noiz’s fingers.

“I don’t know what happened to you, Noiz,” you tell him. “I don’t know what they did to you.” You can hear Mizuki shift uncomfortably in his seat. “And I don’t know why you can’t respond to us. But we need you to eat.”

What kills you the most is that he hasn’t even looked at anyone since you found him. He doesn’t lift his eyes or his head or indicate at all that he wants to look at any of you. He doesn’t meet your gaze. His eyes never move. They’re empty. They’re so empty. He continues staring at the floor as you lift your hand to his face like Granny taught you.

“I’m going to touch your face now,” you tell him. You put your thumb under his jawbone and rub small circles against his cheek with your fingertips until his mouth starts to open. You slowly slip your fingers into his mouth, past his lips and between his teeth, and then pull down softly to open his mouth. You can hear Koujaku sigh and leave the room. Mizuki shifts again, pushing a bowl of baby food into your line of vision. You take the small plastic spoon and start to feed Noiz in silence.

 

It happens again two days later. He won’t open his mouth for Koujaku or Mizuki so they call you and he opens for you immediately. You ask him why. He doesn’t answer.

It’s not difficult for you to take up smoking. Koujaku and Mizuki step out onto his front step for a cigarette every now and then and you follow them. The baby monitor is in Mizuki’s jacket pocket the whole time.

“We need some sort of timetable,” Mizuki says after a particularly harsh drag of his cigarette. “Some kind of schedule for us to all see him at the best time we can.”

“I work during the day,” you remind him, but he shakes his head.

“Not best for us,” he says. “Best for him.”

You don’t reply. Koujaku is a few steps away from you, leaning against a fence and staring at the apartments across the street with his cigarette in his hand.

“Sometimes he doesn’t want me. He wants you.” The words seem hard for Mizuki to say but he chokes them out anyway. “You have to be here sometimes for lunch. He won’t open his mouth for us. He clearly wants you.”

You hadn’t thought of it that way. Judging by Koujaku’s lack of reaction however, he has. Or maybe he simply doesn’t care anymore. You frown at Mizuki. You want to hug him. You want to reassure him. Noiz really cared about him before all this. Noiz wanted to be with him, you’re sure of it. Before Virus and Trip –

You wish you could tell Mizuki that but you know he’d snap.

“It could have been me.”

You don’t know why those words come out of your mouth. Koujaku finally turns his head a bit and Mizuki stares at you quizzically.

“What do you mean?” Mizuki asks.

“You guys had already left,” you tell them. “Virus said they’d finally found someone as interesting as me and just wanted to play with them for a while.” Mizuki drops his cigarette and accidentally releases a labored breath. “But it could have been me. I can’t stop thinking about that.”

“Well figure out how,” Koujaku says tersely. “It doesn’t help us now.”

“But if it had been me then Noiz would be fine.”

“And you’d be sitting in that chair right now. Hypotheticals are not worth it.”

“And Mizuki wouldn’t be hurting as bad right now,” you say. The words come out somewhat angrily but you’re not sure why. You want to hug Mizuki, not accuse him of anything. He breathes out his nose like a bull and stamps his cigarette out.

“That’s bullshit,” he says quietly, shaking his head. “That’s a terrible thing to say. Don’t put that on me.”

You know you shouldn’t. You just feel so guilty. You feel guilty that you knew Virus and Trip in the first place. You feel guilty that you never shrugged them off, even when you knew they were absolute creeps.

You feel guilty that they found Noiz because of you. You feel guilty that you didn’t treat Noiz better when you knew him, because then he might not have felt as vulnerable. You feel guilty that he was susceptible to them because of you. You feel guilty that he’s sitting in Koujaku’s kitchen right now, when it should be you. They wanted _you_. Virus and Trip wanted to play their sick game with you but instead they got to Noiz, who simply let them. There’s no doubt in your mind that he never even put up a fight.

You feel guilty that Mizuki was finally feeling close to someone and it’s your fault that he got taken away.

“I’m just saying,” you mutter. “If it had been me, I’d have Granny. I’d be in my own home. Or I’d still be in the hospital. He ran away from his family. He doesn’t have anyone but us. And maybe he’d be your boyfriend by now.”

Mizuki doesn’t respond. You glance at him to see that his entire body is shaking. His hands are in his pockets, one of them gripping the baby monitor so tightly that his knuckles are turning yellow. There are tears streaming down his cheeks but he looks angrier than you’ve ever seen him – and you’ve seen him angry a lot lately. You look away and take a drag of your cigarette, which still feels unnatural between your fingers.

“Wow,” Mizuki finally says, trying to control the quiver in his voice. “I wasn’t expecting this situation to turn you into such a dick.”

You sigh as he turns to go back inside quickly and Koujaku glares at you as he follows behind him.

You know. You deserve that.

You just don’t know why you said it.

 

It’s exactly one week since you brought Noiz home that you walk in on Mizuki talking to him. You don’t say anything. You don’t let him know you’re there. He’s laughing, and you don’t want to do anything to take that away from him, even though you know you shouldn’t be eavesdropping. They’re on the couch and Mizuki’s back is to you but you can hear the smile in his voice.

“Anyway, I think about that day a lot,” he says. “Akushima had no idea what was going on. No one else ever fucks with Akushima with me like you do. I can’t wait until we do it again.”

Noiz doesn’t respond. His eyes are focused on the wall across from him. Mizuki is sitting as close as he can to him without touching him.

“I guess I should take you to the bathroom soon. I think tonight is a bath night. I promise not to get in with you again, okay? So you don’t need to be worried or nervous. We’ll even keep your underwear on, alright?”

You furrow your brow. Again? What happened last time?

You turn and walk down to Koujaku’s bedroom and knock on his door before letting yourself in. He’s sitting on his bed, back to you, another cigarette in his mouth.

“When did Mizuki give Noiz a bath before?”

He takes a long drag and doesn’t answer.

“It sounds like something bad happened. What happened?”

He sighs loudly and looks up at the ceiling. You stamp your foot in anger.

“Koujaku!” you bark. “Answer me!”

Koujaku stands up and puts his cigarette out in an ashtray. He turns to look at you and raises his eyebrows.

“Mizuki tried to get in the shower with him on Wednesday,” he tells you. You’re incredulous. “It was just easier. It was easier to wash him that way. It wasn’t weird. He wasn’t trying to have sex with him.” He takes a deep breath. “But he freaked out. Started thrashing around. Wouldn’t let us anywhere near him. That’s why we had to call you to come feed him again.”

You’re livid. Not so much that Mizuki tried to get in the shower with him, but that they thought it was okay to not tell you. You start yelling at Koujaku and when Mizuki sticks his head in to ask what the hell is wrong, you yell at him, too. You stomp down the hall to tell Noiz that you’ll see him tomorrow and wish Mizuki and Koujaku good luck. If they need you for something, it’ll have to wait until tomorrow because you’re sure as hell not helping people out when they think it’s fine to keep secrets from you.

Mizuki tries to get you to stay but Koujaku simply lights up another cigarette and lets you go.

You’re livid.

So livid.

 

You come back the next day as you promised Noiz you would, but you don’t say a word when Koujaku opens the door. He seems too tired to care. You both glare at each other as he steps aside and lets you in. The shower is running and you’re about to ask if it’s Noiz but Koujaku tells you he’s on the couch before you can ask. Then he turns to his bedroom and goes inside. You can hear him lock the door behind him.  
It Mizuki must be in the bathroom so you wander quickly to the living room before he can get out and join you. Sure enough, Noiz is there, his hands on his lap. The television is on but Noiz’s eyes are directed at the floor. You suck in a deep breath and approach him slowly.

“He-ey,” you singsong quietly as you sit down next to him. “I told you I’d be back today.”

His eyes stay on the floor. Mizuki was talking to him like everything was normal. You should try that too. You can’t help but think about the inane advice people always give to talk to your plants. You feel sort of like you’re talking to vegetable.

“Um, well…” You shift uncomfortably on the couch next to him and try not to let your knees touch. “Look, I’m just going to say this because I’m not sure when Mizuki will get out of the bathroom and I don’t want him to be here for this. I’m… I’m going to take your hand, okay? I’m just going to hold it while I tell you this, alright?”

You pause a moment and then you bite the bullet. You let out a nervous breath and then grip his fingers tightly in yours. He doesn’t make a sound and you don’t know if you’re relieved or not.

“I’m really sorry that this happened to you,” you say. “I… I know I shouldn’t say this but… I feel like it’s my fault.” You look up from his hands to his face but he still doesn’t react whatsoever. “I feel like… it so easily could have been me. And maybe it should have been. And I’m sorry.” You would cry right now if you had the capacity, but as it is, the past week has been so stressful that you don’t feel much of anything anymore. “It’s my fault that Virus and Trip were… around. It’s my fault. And I think they always wanted me. They just took you because… I don’t know why, Noiz, but you didn’t deserve it.”

Maybe that sounds bad. Maybe that sounds like you’re saying he was their second choice. They didn’t really mean to destroy his life. They wanted to play with you. You were their favorite. But he was fine as a backup.

“I don’t mean it like…” You take a deep breath. Everything is jumbled in your head. Maybe you shouldn’t even bring the concept up. If he’s not thinking it, you don’t want to be the one to plant it in your head.

“Look… I just wanted to say… I think of you as a little brother.”

You squeeze his hand even though you know he can’t feel it.

“And I’m going to be here until you get better… okay?”

You take a deep breath and look at his face. You’re about to sit back on the couch and watch TV with him when something twitches. It’s his – his cheek, you think. His cheekbone twitches. You cock your head slightly and try to look at his eyes.

 

That’s when his pupils move for the first time.

 

They trail up the wall across from him and then pause. You furrow your brows. Did he just move his eyes?

 

Then his head turns.

 

It’s slow but deliberate. He turns his head as far as he needs to in order to look you in the eye.

 

Your heart stops.

 

“Noiz?”

 

His hand moves in yours. You want to cry out for Koujaku or Mizuki or anyone – someone else needs to come and see this – but your throat closes up and your mouth goes dry. You’re astounded. 

Then he stands up. 

In two and a half months he hasn’t done a thing – hasn’t blinked, hasn’t moved, hasn’t even looked at you. Not even for a second. His eyes never moved. And now he’s standing up and turning to you and opening his mouth – 

 

“I have to shit.”

 

Mizuki tells you later that he never thought he’d be so happy for Noiz to interrupt his shower to pull down his pants and take a shit right there in front of him.

“Pretty in character, though,” he says with a smile and a shrug. Even Koujaku seems somewhat pleased.

“What did he do after that?” he asks, bringing his cup of coffee to his lips and taking a long sip. The three of you peer into the living room at Noiz as you converse about him in hushed tones. You shake your head at him.

“Not much. He came back in and sat back down and hasn’t done anything else since.” You take a sip of your own coffee and Mizuki sighs.

“I tried to talk to him while he was in there but I didn’t want to get too close. I think… any time he has his clothes off… I think we need to be careful. Maybe we should ask him if he thinks he can take his own showers from now on.”

 

Of course, when Mizuki asks him exactly that ten minutes later, he doesn’t respond.

And when he doesn’t respond to him the next morning either, Mizuki starts to get frustrated.

When he moves his head in front of all of you to look at you again the next afternoon, Mizuki gets up and leaves the room.

You don’t see him again all day.

 

“He’s mad at me.”

“He’s not mad at you,” Koujaku assures you, gripping your hand from across the kitchen table. “I know he’s not, he told me.”

“You guys talk about me?”

Koujaku rolls his eyes.

“Not like that,” he says. “Why don’t you go talk to him yourself?”

“I don’t think he wants to talk to me.”

“I think you’d be surprised.”

You take a deep breath and stand up from the kitchen table. It’s been twenty-four hours since Noiz went to the bathroom on his own and several since he looked at you at the kitchen table. He’s made no effort to react to Koujaku but that’s to be expected; he’s made no effort to let Mizuki know he realizes he’s there either. That one is a little more raw.

You find Mizuki lying on Koujaku’s bed, his back to the door and curled around a tasseled pillow. You know Koujaku and Mizuki share beds often, in a way you tend not to do with them, and you wonder if

Mizuki knows how much you actually love him. Koujaku has always sort of been the common denominator between the two of you, even though you met Mizuki independently of him. Somehow your friendship with Mizuki became almost dependent on Koujaku and you don’t know when that happened. You don’t want it to be that way.

You sit down on the other side of the bed and wonder if he’s even awake.

“Mizuki?”

He takes a deep breath.

“You going home for the night?”

His voice is light and soft and not at all accusatory. He doesn’t sound angry, but you feel like he should be.

“No, I just… I wanted to talk.”

It’s silent as Mizuki seems to contemplate your request. He doesn’t move for several seconds, and then he sits up slowly, gently shifting his weight forward and staring at the foot of the bed. When you turn to look at him, his eyes are red and puffy and he isn’t trying to hide it.

You feel terrible.

“I just…”

This is the second serious conversation you’ve had in two days. The first one caused an almost vegetable to get up out of his seat for the first time in over two months. You get the feeling this one isn’t going to be as productive.

“I just wanted to say… I’m sorry. For blaming you the other day. For being upset about Noiz. We’re all upset about him.”

“I don’t think Koujaku is.”

You look at him in shock. Koujaku wasn’t Noiz’s biggest fan, but he seems just as exhausted and stressed out as the both of you. You’re surprised that Mizuki would feel that way.

“What do you mean?”

“He just… does what he’s told. He just lies around in here all day and listens to the baby monitor but nothing ever happens. He doesn’t get up and help him unless he hears something weird. He waits until I get home and then he goes out to cut hair and then he gets back and sleeps all night until I have to go to work again. I’m the one who puts Noiz to bed. I’m the one who wakes him up and showers him and takes him to the bathroom. If I’m not around, Koujaku does it and he doesn’t complain.”

 _He waits until I get home._ You bite your inner lip. This isn’t Mizuki’s home. You wonder how long it’s been since he’s been to his own home.

“And that’s not a good thing?” you ask. Mizuki purses his lips in frustration.

“When have you known Koujaku to do anything with Noiz without complaining?” he asks. It’s true, but you don’t understand his point. “He doesn’t care at all. He’s just doing what’s asked of him. He’s just going through the motions of taking care of some sick patient that is somehow his responsibility. It’s like he’s completely empty. The first time I’ve seen him smile in months was when Noiz stood up on his own. The first time he’s been happy in months was when he had an inkling that Noiz might be up and out of his house.”

“We were all happy when Noiz stood up,” you remind him. “It was a good thing, Mizuki.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head grimly. He looks you right in the eye and you feel it. You can feel him staring at you. You almost let out a fearful breath. “You and I were happy that Noiz stood up. You and I were happy that Noiz was showing signs of recovery. You and I were happy that Noiz might get better and be back to his old self one day. Koujaku is happy that Noiz might get better and leave so _he_ can go back to his old self.”

You open your mouth to say something but nothing comes out. You can’t believe what you’re hearing. Koujaku has been your best friend since you were children. No one has been better to you than Koujaku, not even Mizuki. You can’t stand to hear someone who is apparently so close to him say something so terrible, but you don’t know how to respond.

“Do you know about Noiz’s family?”

You’re pulled from your thoughts when Mizuki speaks again and you turn to stare at him, dumbfounded. You have to take a few seconds to register what he asked and you decide it’s too important to hear him out than to call him out so you shake your head.

“No, I don’t,” you tell him. “What about them?”

He looks away in what you think is fear and you’re suddenly more concerned than you are angry. You clench the blanket in your fingers.

“They were abusive.”

“What?”

“They locked him up. I don’t know why. His parents. They locked him up. For years. Honestly, years of his life. Since he was about four, he was locked in a room until the day he ran away to come here. He told me he came here for Rhyme but I don’t know why he’d do that. I mean…” His voice lowers. “I’m glad he did, but…”

“He… wait,” you shake your head. “He was… locked up?”

“His parents locked him up. I don’t know why. He wouldn’t explain it and I didn’t really understand. I just know that his parents didn’t let him out of like, a wing of the house. Not even to see his little brother. I think he’s really screwed up about him. I think he misses him a lot.”

Your heart jumps into your throat as you put the pieces together.

“Did he… ever tell you about his condition?”

Mizuki’s head whips up to you in confusion.

“Condition?” he asks. “What condition?”

“His… I don’t know. His skin. His condition.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

You suck in a deep breath.

“I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you.”

“I wasn’t supposed to tell you about his family,” Mizuki says sadly. “I think we’re passed that at this point.”

You nod at him in understanding. Noiz isn’t able to take a piss by himself; he probably doesn’t care so much if you tell Mizuki about his condition.

“He can’t feel anything,” you tell him. “He has no sense of touch. I guess you have to press really hard, like your fingernails into his skin for him to even feel it. He told me that as a kid, he didn’t understand that certain things would hurt other people because he didn’t feel it himself. Maybe… that has something to do with it.”

Mizuki’s face is contorted into some strange expression somewhere between confusion and shock and anger and sadness all at once. You don’t blame him. You’re all of those, too. Confused about Noiz’s story, shocked that his family could be so terrible, angry that they would be, and sad that he never told anyone. Mizuki’s breath quickens and then he turns away to wipe tears from his eyes.

“I didn’t know that,” he says. “He never told me that.”

“He only told me because I caught him,” you say quickly. “He only said it because I saw him cut himself once. Bad. And he didn’t react at all… I guess he has a pattern of not reacting to things.”

Mizuki shakes his head, still facing away from you. You don’t know what else to say. None of this conversation has gone the way you thought it would.

“I guess it makes sense,” he whispers. He takes in a staccato breath, punctured by his lungs trying to keep himself from crying. “He asked me to use my teeth when I sucked his dick. I had to bite pretty hard.”

It takes you a few seconds to really understand what Mizuki just said.

You retch.

“I don’t need to hear that!” you cry.

Your friends are disgusting, but you have to admit that your heart swells up a bit when Mizuki turns to you with a grin that you haven’t seen in months.

 

But it’s nothing compared to the grin you see when you walk into Koujaku’s living room the next morning.

“What’s going on in here?” you ask. Mizuki has his head against Noiz’s shoulder. They’re cuddling, for lack of a better term.

“He kissed my cheek,” Mizuki says simply. “And now we’re on a date. So can you please leave?”

You ask Koujaku if he’s heard what happened. He looks up at you from his breakfast with a tired stare.

“I heard.”

“Isn’t that great?” you ask excitedly as you sit down in the chair next to him. “He’s going to the bathroom and kissing Mizuki’s cheek. That’s great.”

Koujaku continues to stare at you. It’s almost pityingly. It pisses you off.

“I’m supposed to be happy that he took one shit by himself?” he asks. “I’m supposed to be excited that he’ll look at you and kiss Mizuki but he still doesn’t register that I’m even in this house?”

Your face softens at Koujaku’s words.

“He knows he’s in my house. He’s registering everything going on around him, that’s what the doctor said. He knows he’s just sitting around my house, taking up my space, taking up my money. He doesn’t care. I’m supposed to be excited that he deigns to talk to you two? The two that he always wanted to have sex with?”

You’re angry again.

You stand up suddenly and knock Koujaku’s plate to the floor.

“You’re being a real jackass,” you tell him. “Mizuki was right. You don’t care that he’s getting better. You just care that he’ll get out of your life.”

You turn to leave but Koujaku calls after you:

“Don’t act like you aren’t thinking that, too.”

You hate Koujaku. You’ve always hated Koujaku – you’ve hated that he’s handsome and romantic and popular and suave. You’ve always sort of hated Koujaku because you’ve always been sort of jealous. It wasn’t a real hate. It was just that it was easier to sum up how much you cared about Koujaku by pretending to hate him for making you love him so much. But right now you hate him. You hate Koujaku with every fiber of your being.

 

And you _really_ hate that he’s right.


	3. Familial

Mizuki has been giving you hell for the past half an hour and you’re sick of it.

Noiz is sitting calmly on the couch, his eyes focused on the TV, but you know he’s not actually watching. He sometimes goes to the bathroom on his own but outside of looking at you and kissing Mizuki’s cheek, he hasn’t done much else. In fact, he’s almost gotten worse. Mizuki tells you he has nightmares sometimes and wakes up screaming. It wakes Mizuki up, who’s taken to sleeping outside his door or on the floor in the same room. You think it’s a little much. Koujaku refuses to talk to him.

Which is why you’re sick of it the first time Mizuki tells you that you shouldn’t be taking time off work so much to come around. But Haga-san knows the situation and so does Granny; they both know that you’re not avoiding work to slack off and Mizuki knows that, too. You’ve started doing more of an “on-call” thing with Heibon, so that you can be available if Koujaku and Mizuki need help with Noiz, and Haga-san doesn’t mind. If your boss doesn’t mind, Mizuki shouldn’t mind.

“I just don’t think you should keep doing it. It’s easy for Koujaku and I to make our own hours. You’re not really your own boss.”

He has a point, but you don’t really care.

“Mizuki…”

“You can’t keep calling off. He needs you there.”

“Mizuki?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you go home, then?”

Mizuki is holding Noiz’s hand on the couch, stroking his palm with his impossibly long fingers even though he knows by now that he can’t feel a thing. He turns to you suddenly, hurt and glaring.

“That’s not fair. That’s not the same thing at all.”

“You go sleep in your own bed for the first time in three weeks, and I’ll go back to work.” You smile darkly at him. “How about that?”

Mizuki snarls and turns back to the TV. His fingers trace against Noiz’s palm even harder and you cross your arms in front of you as you lean back in Koujaku’s deep, soft chair and start to nod off.

Tensions are so high between you and your best friends that you accidentally take it home with you. When you snap on Granny, she manages to restrain herself in a way she never has before, and asks you what’s wrong.

 

She accompanies you to Koujaku’s the next day.

You think it’s to take care of Noiz – and it is – but it’s really to take care of the three of you.

She makes sure Noiz is comfortable first, bringing him a warm soup with bits of pork in it. Mizuki tries to take it from her but she insists on feeding him on her own and rushes Mizuki into the bathroom, urging him to take a moment to himself and have a long bath. As she’s pushing him past you, you realize that Mizuki does look frazzled – dark undereye circles and cracked lips and he seems relieved to be forced into taking care of himself for once.

They don’t know that you see it, but she gives Koujaku a long, lingering hug after feeding Noiz, and you swear you see him sniffle into her shoulder a bit. He’s so much taller than her that he has to crane down to reach her, but he seems to melt into her once he does; he’s three times her size but seems to revert back to childhood when she comforts him. He’s always loved Granny – and she’s always loved him. You didn’t see that the three of you had been torn so apart by this until Granny started putting you back together.

Dinner is awkward and quiet but some of that might be that none of you have had such a good meal in a long time; Granny’s cooking certainly keeps your mouths preoccupied with chewing rather than talking, but you all know it’s not the only reason no one is speaking. Granny knows it too, which is why she collects your plates when you’re finished but instructs you all to stay seated. When Granny speaks, you all listen (Mizuki watches as she heads to the kitchen and then turns to poke his head around the corner of the wall into the living room to check on Noiz; she catches him but chooses not to reprimand him). She sits back down after the dishes are in the sink and rests her chin on the back of her hands for several silent seconds.

“This boy is in bad shape,” she says finally. You bite your bottom lip. Granny usually knows what she’s talking about. “I’ve can only imagine that it’s mostly psychological. Some people might consider him a faker. I don’t.”

“No one here considers him that,” Mizuki says quietly. Your eyes dart to Koujaku but Granny’s face softens as she looks at Mizuki.

“That is why this is so hard on the three of you,” she says. “That’s why you’re all at the end of your rope. You all realize that this is serious and this boy isn’t faking a medical condition. You’re worried for him.

You’re worried for yourselves. You do what you can, but I believe it’s time to have a professional come in.”

“We’ve had a professional,” you reply as quietly as Mizuki did. “He was at a hospital.”

“And they brought him back to physical health,” Granny nods. “Now it’s time to work on his mental health.”

You give Mizuki a furtive glance and he does the same to you. Then he looks to Koujaku, who stares back worriedly. He turns to you and takes a deep breath.

 

That’s how a woman ends up coming to Koujaku’s house twice a week to try to get Noiz to react to her. 

It doesn’t work.

She’s fairly young and you’re terrified that Koujaku is going to try to seduce her, but she seems too intelligent to fall for his charms. You and Mizuki have clandestine afternoon snacks in the dining room and watch her work her magic, but she’s not any better a magician than the three of you. She knows Granny personally and gives you sad smiles when she leaves. You and Mizuki always try to pretend you’re not rushing into Noiz’s room the second she leaves, but you tend to blow your covers when you assault him with questions he never answers.

After two weeks of consults, Granny comes by again. She stands next to you as you both stare at Noiz and Mizuki, their eyes shut and mouths open on the couch as they take an afternoon nap. Mizuki has his head on Noiz’s shoulder. Noiz has no idea Mizuki even exists.

“I think Mizuki is in love with him,” you tell her. She doesn’t answer. “I think he’s more in love with him now than he was before.”

 

Noiz’s face twitches and you hear Granny’s breath hitch. Your breath hitches, too.

 

He doesn’t move again.

Granny lets you put your head in her lap as you cry yourself to sleep that night. She’s the only one who knows how gently to stroke your hair. That’s because you did this for two years straight when your parents left.

You’re sitting alone with Noiz one day while Mizuki is at Black Needle. His eyes are on the TV and you’re hunched forward in the chair across from the couch, your legs spread apart and your hands clasped between them. You stare at him and think about how he got here.

You suppose you don’t really know. You know, of course, about Virus and Trip and all that – you know how he got here, but you don’t know how he ended up in their grips in the first place. How did he really end up here? What happened that made him decide to do something that would eventually bring him here, to Koujaku’s apartment, all but catatonic and despondent and unable to parse reality together?

It’s a grim situation, you realize, when it occurs to you that Virus and Trip outright kidnapping him would be the best scenario. At least Noiz didn’t want it. Of course, then you have to bite back tears thinking about Noiz struggling for a year against those two, and you still feel so much guilt rack your body for not seeing it before. You should have known. You should have known and you kind of suspected, that’s the worst part.

Your upper lip curls up into a sneer as you stare at him. You’re not angry with him. You’re angry at Virus. And Trip. And –

You’re angry with parents who could leave a child they’d just adopted but you’re even angrier with parents who could throw their child away so quickly. You often feel like your parents should have just left you at that church if all they were going to do was leave you with Granny anyway, so you have to admit that you sort of relate to Noiz. Having a child with no intention of taking care of them? That makes you grit your teeth. What did Noiz’s parents do to him to make him feel like…

That’s the other explanation. Maybe Virus and Trip didn’t kidnap Noiz. Maybe he went with them willingly. And that’s the explanation that makes your chest tighten.

Mizuki was the first person to tell you about Noiz’s parents weeks ago and you never really had the chance to react to it. But now that you’re thinking about it, your hands are balling into fists and Noiz is so dead and quiet on the couch that you want to beat something up. You want to beat his mom and dad to a pulp and then you start to worry about the little brother that Mizuki mentioned and shit, are they locking him up, too? Noiz is really pretty when you stare at him long enough – his skin is surprisingly smooth and his face is so angular in a way yours is not. You see why Mizuki is into him. And you want to kill his parents.

You stand up suddenly and rush to the couch and you sit next to him instead. You take his hand in yours and shake your head in confusion. You don’t know why you’re doing this, you just feel like you’re exploding with something. If only you knew what that something was.

“Noiz, you… I told you that I always thought of you as a little brother, you know? But… what happened to your little brother?”

His eyes flicker for a moment but he doesn’t move. You scoot closer to him and try to make him hear you.

“Is there something… we can do about him?” you ask, tugging on his hand, urging him to speak. “Can you give me anything? A number? A name? Anything? Because if he’s your little brother… he’s my little brother, too.”

Nothing.

Noiz does absolutely nothing.

You end up falling asleep against his shoulder, too. Mizuki shakes you awake about an hour later and gives you a sad smile that looks just like the therapist’s. You glare at him and he doesn’t understand why; you get up and brush past him angrily. You don’t know why, either.

 

The therapist tells you that he’s showing no signs of improvement and that pisses you off.

“Obviously,” you mutter. “Is my grandmother paying you for these insights?”

Koujaku frowns at you and puts his hand on your shoulder. You know it was a pretty rude thing to say but you can’t help it. She doesn’t seem put off.

“I’m helping because your grandmother is an old friend of my family’s,” she says calmly. That pisses you off, too. You want her to be upset, just like you’re upset, just like Mizuki is upset. You shove Koujaku off you when you realize he isn’t a part of that list, either. He furrows his brows at you again as the therapist continues, “I understand that it’s frustrating. Maybe the three of you could do with some counseling as well?”

You scoff and leave the room. It’s no surprise to you a couple days later when she comes by for an appointment with Koujaku and he takes her into his room alone. You kick the dry wall in his apartment so hard that you dent it and Mizuki throws back a third glass of wine as he pretends he didn’t see.

A part of you – a very real part of you, a part of you that has a name and a personality all his own, it feels like – gets angry with everyone you know simply for not being Noiz. And you get angry with Noiz for not responding to you anymore. You lie awake at night praying that Noiz will say something again. You pray that he’ll do more than stand up to go take a piss. Every time he gets off the couch you watch with baited breath but he disappears into the bathroom and comes back out again and falls asleep, just as dead as always. You wish he’d do something. Anything.

 

But not this.

“He just keeps saying your name,” is what Mizuki told you over the phone before you rushed over. You could hear him in the background, screaming louder than you’d ever heard him before. “He wants you, I don’t know why. But he’s flipping out. Get over here.”

Mizuki watches with tearful eyes as you approach him like he’s a wild stallion and you’re the only trainer he’ll listen to. You shout at him and remind him who you are – it’s Aoba, you’re Aoba and you’re here now and you’re here to take care of your little brother. It’s Aoba. You’re Aoba. Noiz’s older brother.

His eyes are crazed and wild like you’ve never seen them, but he doesn’t seem insane or angry or dangerous – he’s scared. His eyes are terrified and darting around the room as he pulls away from anyone who tries to go near him. He’s screaming but he’s not putting any real words together and that’s when Mizuki shouts from the corner of the room: “He’s breaking from reality. He’s back there. He’s reliving it and I don’t know why.”

Mizuki had breaks from reality sometimes. He relived his traumatic moments with Morphine, too. He probably knows better than you.

Yet Noiz still only wants you.

You put your hands up and implore him to take them, to feel your hands, to realize that you’re not Virus or Trip – but of course, he can’t feel your hands. You don’t know what to do. He’s crying out for you and you’re here but you don’t know how to help.

You get so upset that your body hits its breaking point and you go completely calm. You can’t take it. You can’t take Noiz like this. Something else comes over you and your voice goes deadly low. Lower than you even thought you could go:

 

“Noiz. Stop.”

 

You stare him in the eyes and he stops moving. His breathing is still erratic though, and you smile at him unwittingly.

“You’re here now. You’re with us. It’s Aoba. Sit down on the couch and relax.”

 

Later that night, Koujaku and Mizuki will talk about you in hushed whispers out in the hallway and you won’t really give a shit. You don’t know how you calmed Noiz down either, and when you think back on it, all you really remember is a doorway leading to nowhere. It doesn’t make sense to you but you’re not about to tell them that.

It’s been three months since Noiz came home from the hospital and your relationships with Mizuki and Koujaku have been completely ruined. Koujaku’s because all he tends to these days is smoke on the balcony and shut himself up in his room so you don’t see him even when you’re in his house; Mizuki’s because Noiz still seems to prefer you to him. It’s hard to prove it since he hardly moves, but you both feel it. Mizuki isn’t mad at you for it, but you don’t blame him for being sad.

 

But it’s Koujaku who shocks you.

“I want to fucking kill Virus and Trip.”

Your head is nearly drooping off your hand in exhaustion. The night is unseasonably warm so you and Koujaku are sitting out on his porch while he smokes a cigarette. Mizuki is sitting outside the door as Noiz takes a bath. But when Koujaku says those words, your eyes pop open.

“You – what?”

Koujaku can be hard to read. He’s a little overdramatic at times and you know that he’s covering something up. Maybe not anything big, but he seems to be playing a part most of the time and you see the real Koujaku more than anyone else, other than possibly Mizuki. You see him fake it around other people and it makes you wonder how much he’s faking in front of you.

He’s not faking this.

“I could kill them,” he says. “And I would. If I ever find them, I’ll kill them.”

You believe him. And that’s terrifying.

“Noiz doesn’t need you to do that.”

He shrugs.

“Not doing it just for Noiz,” he says. Just for Noiz. That means he is, if just a little bit.

“What do you mean, ‘not doing it?’” you ask. “You talk like you’re going to do it. You’re not doing it at all.”

He blows a smoke ring from his lips and stares up at the night sky. He puts the cigarette down against the table between you and clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

“If I did do it… it wouldn’t just be for Noiz.”

You look up at the sky with him and roll your eyes. Fine. You’ll humor him.

“Yeah? Okay. Then who would you be doing it for?”

He doesn’t answer you and you doze off in the chair several minutes later. He picks you up and takes you inside and asks if you’d like to sleep in his bed that night. You’re too tired to go home so you nod against his chest and curl into him as you fall asleep again. He’s your best friend Koujaku. You like the way he feels. It’s safe. It’s Koujaku. Just like always.

 

“It’s been three months and we’re falling asleep in chairs and sitting up in the hallway and on the floor and on the couch,” Koujaku shakes his head the next day. “We have to figure ourselves out. We can’t help Noiz if we can’t even figure ourselves out.”

“We should move into a bigger apartment,” Mizuki drones lazily, his head buried in his arm on the kitchen table. You both know it’s not a serious suggestion but Koujaku rolls his eyes anyway.

“We just need to spend more time on ourselves. It’s not like we can’t work in shifts. We just refuse to.” He looks pointedly at Mizuki, who doesn’t see him. “We need to start taking time to ourselves. Maybe even each other.”

“Each other?” you ask. “What do you mean?”

Koujaku licks his lips and doesn’t answer. He looks at you with wide eyes and then jerks his head to the hallway. He looks down at Mizuki, whose head is still firmly planted in his arm and you nod.

“Hang on one second, Mizuki,” he says and Mizuki groans but doesn’t protest. You follow Koujaku into the hall but aren’t expecting him to wrap his arms around your waist so suddenly. He pulls you into a massive hug and you grip his wrists tightly and try to pull him off.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

He sighs against you. Your grip weakens. There’s silence for several seconds.

“Falling asleep last night was so easy. I haven’t been able to sleep in weeks. And it was because I was with you.” He presses his nose against your hair gently and you can feel his breath against your skin. “I needed it. I need you. I need you both. Please.”

You’ve never heard him speak like this before. You register that you want to push him away and yell at him for being so cuddly, but you can’t. He’s so needy and desperate and you bring one hand up to grip his kimono tightly in a half-hearted hug. All three of you have been acting out of character lately. It’s because you care. All three of you do care about Noiz. You wouldn’t be this stressed out, otherwise.

You ask Mizuki to put Noiz to bed early tonight and Noiz doesn’t complain, though you almost wish he would. Mizuki picks him up with his shoulder and drags him to his room. He spends fifteen minutes in there with the door closed as Koujaku fixes a pot of coffee and then takes the amaretto liquor down from the highest shelf. Mizuki finally emerges, his eyes tired and hair rumpled, to find a deck of cards and a pot of spiked coffee on Koujaku’s kitchen table. Koujaku offers him a drag of his cigarette and then points at the cards laid out in front of the empty seat.

“We never finished that round at Aoba’s house,” he says. When Mizuki catches on, he looks at you in bewilderment and you smirk at him.

“I’m going to kick your ass,” you say. Once Mizuki grins at you, you turn to Koujaku. “Both your asses.”

You get drunker than you mean to. All three of you do. Koujaku giggles just like before and Mizuki smiles for the first time in months – it’s still his classic poker face, but it’s a smile. He tries to read you and you give everything away because you haven’t felt this loose in a while. You almost forget that Noiz is bedridden and catatonic in the next room over.

You all end up on the porch smoking and yelling. You’re debating about whether Koujaku’s most recent conquest was hot or not – you don’t tend to find any of the girls Koujaku picks up very attractive, but

Mizuki thinks you’re just overly judgmental. Maybe a little jealous? You frown at him and shove him so hard he almost goes toppling over the porch rail. Koujaku laughs nervously and puts his Coil back in his pocket. Of course he had to show you her picture on his Coil – you haven’t seen her in person because he can’t bring her home.

He can’t bring anyone home.

Maybe it’s the alcohol, but that realization hits you a lot harder tonight than it used to. Noiz is practically dead. This kid you hardly knew is basically a vegetable and he’s your responsibility. This kid you hardly knew is dying more and more as the days go by and you still think of him as a little brother. You get a little teary eyed on the porch and have to use your sleeve to dab your eyes when no one’s looking.

 

You’re too hungover the next day to leave Koujaku’s place, but Mizuki has to go to Black Needle so you take the morning Noiz shift. Mizuki gets him out of bed and on the couch but you insist that he sit outside for a few hours today. Mizuki does his best not to roll his eyes but you can tell he’s annoyed with you so you ask him what his problem is.

“You coddle him,” he tells you as he wraps Noiz’s arm around his shoulder again to pick him up off the couch. You’re shocked.

“Coddle him?” you ask. “You’re the one who sits next to him all day pretending like everything’s fine.”

Mizuki shakes his head as he moves Noiz outside. You open the door for him but glare as he walks past.

“I don’t pretend like everything is fine,” he tells you. “I just treat him like I always used to. I don’t act like anything is different.”

“But things are different,” you say. Mizuki doesn’t respond. He puts Noiz in a chair and asks if he can kiss his cheek before he leaves. Noiz doesn’t reply so Mizuki winces and refrains. You bet Noiz would let you kiss his cheek.

“There’s a big difference between treating him like things are different and like things will never be the same again,” Mizuki says as he’s heading back inside. His voice is lower, graver, and you frown.

“What’s that mean?”

“You can treat him different, like this is the way it is now and things will never go back to how they were.” He shuffles inside the door and starts to close it. “Or you can treat like him you used to treat him and hope that he remembers how things used to be. Acting like he’s a lost cause who needs to be coddled doesn’t do anyone any good. I take him on dates to the couch now because he disappeared one day before we were supposed to go on our first date. You’re treating him like everything is changed. I’m just picking up where we left off.”

He disappears inside the house and you stare after him in disbelief.

He has some nerve saying that to you the morning after the three of you spent hours laughing with each other again. You shake your head and look over at Noiz. He’s like a geriatric old man: his feet are positioned awkwardly, facing inward, and his fingers spill lithely over the arms of the chair, gripless and boneless. It’s like he simply stayed in the position that Mizuki dropped him in, completely unable to readjust and you feel like you would be uncomfortable like that, but you suppose it doesn’t matter one way or the other to him.

He can’t feel it.

You shuffle over to him and crouch down in front of him.

“Noiz, I’m going to touch you, okay?” you tell him. “But it’s only to rearrange your limbs. Your muscles will get tired like this and you won’t be able to feel it, but it won’t be good for you. Is that okay, Noiz?”

You gasp when Noiz’s eyes move slowly down to meet yours. You raise your eyebrows and can’t help but break out into a grin.

“Did you hear what I said?” you ask.

You watch with baited breath. It’s like his neck is on rusty hinges in desperate need of oil; he nods, but slowly, torturously so, but he nods nonetheless.

“Noiz!” you cry. It’s the first movement in over a month other than to go to the bathroom or break with reality. You grab his shins and lean up toward his face. “Noiz, I…”

You grasp for something else. What else can you say that will make him react? Another question? What will Noiz react to the most?

“Noiz… your brother.”

You don’t know why that’s what comes to mind. The second you say it, a thousand other ideas come to you instead. Rhyme? Mizuki? Sex? Why did you ask about his family? But you’ve said it now so you simply lick your lips and look up at him, waiting for his reply.

It doesn’t come right away. You grip his feet and turn them outwards, holding his gaze the whole time. He blinks as slowly as you’ve ever seen, and when he finally opens his eyes, he’s looking away again. He breathes in slow through his nose; you can hear the air rush in and then he parts his lips:

 

“Wilhelm.”

 

You raise your eyebrows.

“Vi… Vill- em?”

He doesn’t answer you, probably because you have you no idea what he just said and simply repeated a mess of sounds back to him. He sits back in the chair and brings his arms into his lap. He looks far more comfortable like this.

“Wilhelm.”

It’s a name. A name you can’t pronounce but you do recognize it nonetheless. You’re not sure how, but you know it. Noiz is telling you his brother’s name.

“His name is Wilhelm?” you ask urgently. His throat rattles and you pull back.

“No.”

His voice is so dry and crackly that you almost get up to take a step toward the door to get him a glass of water until you realize what he’s said.

“No?”

He shakes his head slowly.

“No.”

“Who’s Wilhelm, then?” you ask, pronouncing it the best you’re able. He breathes in through his nose again, just as before. The words come as one huge expulsion of air:

“I’m Wilhelm.”

Your mouth falls open. You’re in a weird place between shock and understanding; you realize that Noiz probably had a real name other than Noiz – they asked at the hospital and you had to make something up (you said Ren) – but you weren’t expecting him to ever tell you what it was.

“And… your brother?”

He turns his entire body away from you and stares off the side of the porch.

 

“Theo.”

 

 

You tell Mizuki later that day. You tell him that Noiz spoke again today, he told you his real name and his brother’s name, but when you start to tell him what they are, Mizuki stops you.

“I don’t want to know.”

He has his hand up between you and you’re confused.

“Why not?”

“Because he didn’t tell me.”

You frown.

“I’m sure he expects me to tell you. We told each other stuff about him before.”

“I asked him what his name was once,” Mizuki shakes his head. He has a plastic bag with some food in it and he drops it on Koujaku’s counter and starts to take jars of peaches out of it. “He didn’t want to tell me. If he doesn’t want me to know, I don’t want to go against that.”

You cock your head to the side in complete bewilderment. This is not the same. He probably didn’t want Mizuki to know his name before because ‘Wilhelm’ is a stupid fucking name. But things are different now.

He probably assumed that you would tell him.

“Mizuki, I – ”

“Look,” Mizuki interrupts you. He doesn’t sound annoyed. He’s actually smiling and it feels genuine. “I’m glad he told you, Aoba. I’m glad he has you. I know you think of him as a brother. He needs that. He needs more than a boyfriend. I’m glad he has you.”

Koujaku tells you the same thing later that night.

“I’m glad I have you,” he adds. “We’re all very lucky to have you. We’re all very lucky to have each other.”

You realize he’s right. The four of you are sitting Koujaku’s living room watching a video of Mizuki falling off a skateboard from a few years ago. Koujaku edited it together to repeat the fall several times and he laughs harder and harder each time he rewinds it. He’s straining to breathe and Mizuki is laughing too, but he’s also kicking Koujaku in the shins and berating him for continuing to film instead of making sure he was okay. You remember this day. It was three years ago and you had to help take Mizuki to the hospital after he attempted the trick again and almost broke his leg.

Noiz is sitting on the couch between you and Mizuki. He chuckles.

You feel lucky to have all of them, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of ACT I


	4. Intruder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Regret Defend Doubt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ACT II: The Rival

Two years ago, a kid with stringy, yellow hair came into your life. His eyes were so small and beady that they reminded you of a weasel and just the tone of his voice was more grating than nails on a chalkboard. He was annoying. He was obnoxious. He berated you in the most frustrating way possible — a way that was impossible for you to call out, to convince other people of, and you got the short of the stick every time. He would smirk in your direction when no one else was looking and hit on you loudly for the entire bar to hear.

  
But worse than that, he hit on Aoba, too. When that didn’t work, he took Mizuki from you. That was when you declared him your mortal enemy, not that you ever filed the appropriate paperwork to make that official. Everyone would make fun of you if they knew how seriously you took your hatred from him, so you kept it to yourself: Noiz was your enemy, your arch-nemesis, the villain of your piece. He was abrasive, immature, incorrigible, and perverted.

He was also not all that bad.

You even thought that then — that even though you despised him, perhaps to the point of wishing he’d leave your life forever, he wasn’t really a terrible person. Just a month or so before he disappeared, you even had started to come around to his sense of humor at times and didn’t go home hating the nights you spent at Black Needle with him. When Mizuki first fell for him, you were confused as hell. But it started to become clearer the more you got to know him: Noiz was young and helpless and it materialized in unfortunate ways. But he was actually kind of a nice guy, and deep down, he probably just wanted to be liked.

You still hated him. But he wasn’t so bad.

When he vanished from the face of the Earth, you were kind of angry. Not because you missed him so much, but because he stuck around just long enough to get Mizuki attached to him — Aoba too, even — and then just left, as if it was no big deal. He decided to hang out long enough to get people to care about him — your friends, no less — and then he took off, leaving you to take care of them. You were the one left to dry Mizuki’s tears and quell his insecurities, and that cancelled out any sort of relief you would have otherwise felt at Noiz’s sudden lack of presence. You didn’t get to be glad that he was gone. You had to be angry that he hurt everyone so much.

At the time, you thought it would have been much easier if he had never existed. You thought that the first time you ever met him, too, but it started to dissipate the more he made you laugh over the months. But it resurfaced with a vengeance when Mizuki was soaking the shoulder of your kimono because he couldn’t see for crying. Everything would have been so much easier if Noiz had never existed.

It’s incredible how terrible you feel about that now.

It certainly never helped that he seemed more interested in Aoba at first. You always felt as though his interest in Mizuki was born simply out of Aoba’s rejection. So not only was he hitting on the only person you’d ever been in love with, but when he couldn’t get him, he took your best friend instead. Love of your life to best friend — Noiz was always in your life. Noiz was always in your relationships. You didn’t want one with him personally, but he sure as hell forced you into it.

Then again, you might have to thank Noiz in a way. You sort of owe it to him that you were finally able to come to terms with your feelings for Aoba — best friends don’t imagine each other when they’re jerking off in bed, and they definitely don’t imagine falling asleep next to them afterwards. They don’t imagine what their weddings would look like or where their first house would be or what their kids would look like. You never imagined that stuff with Mizuki anyway, so when Noiz threatened to take Aoba away from you, you had to admit it to yourself: you didn’t have a single clue what a lovechild between you and Mizuki would look like. But Michio would have your hair and Aoba’s skin. Michio was the name Aoba picked out, and you agreed to it. You would name your child anything, as long as you got to raise them with Aoba. 

That was your fantasy. That was always your fantasy. Noiz just helped you realize it, whether he meant to or not.

That was how you first knew Noiz. The irascible child who had to hold his pants up when he ran and whose shirt rode up way far too high on his torso. Ol’ Noizy Two-Pants, as he was known around your apartment. The less said about him, the better.

And you let him know it. There was never any doubt in his mind that you would be happier if he’d just left. In fact, some arrogant part of you thought it was because of you that he left. You’d felt a little guilty, since Mizuki was such a wreck, but it wasn’t like you asked him to go. You simply never treated him like he was welcome — and with the way he treated you, even Mizuki admitted that it was fair. Maybe something about the way you acted like he would never really be a part of the group — he would never really be normal, he would never really be the same as you guys, because you guys had been friends for years, you guys were all from the island, you were all Japanese, you didn’t have an odd accent at times or features of a white boy — maybe that’s why he left. Maybe that’s why he didn’t feel welcome. Maybe that’s why he left.

It all seems so ridiculous now.

Your severe hatred of Noiz is a time-honored tradition. And it’s what makes it so easy to convince Aoba and Mizuki that you don’t come out of your room because you don’t like Noiz.

You don’t like Noiz. But that’s not why you don’t take care of him.

You would and you do take care of him, of course. You didn’t argue when Tae-san suggested you bring him to your place. Mostly because you know that you don’t argue with Tae-san but also because you’re twenty-nine years old and you can take care of another human being. It’s not that big of a deal.

The reason you hardly emerge from your room anymore is because Mizuki is there around the clock. And when he’s not there, Aoba is.

And because you hate seeing Noiz in this state.

Of course, Mizuki and Aoba do too, but with you, it’s different. You don’t see an old friend or an old flame that you want to nurse back to health. You don’t see someone you once had feelings for and now feel sorry for. Actually – that’s not true.

You want to nurse Noiz back to health. And you do feel sorry for him. You feel sorry that he’s so pathetic. You want him to get better because looking at him now makes you feel disgusted. For longer than you would like to remember, you helped the kid take a shit and that was when you really blocked the whole thing out. He couldn’t even bathe on his own and holding his dick out of the way as he sat down on the toilet or bent over to wipe his ass was not something that you particularly want to think back on. Even when he’s sitting on the couch — fully clothed, no less — he’s an absolute mess. He drools and spits his food up and will start to flail around remorselessly for no reason. He has breakdowns and you can’t fix them. You have to call Mizuki or Aoba and you never know which one he’s going to react to best. Aoba thinks he’s on call all day, every day, but in actuality, Mizuki is the one that Noiz seems to be closest to. He’s the one that Noiz is most willing to touch, at least. And after what brought him here, that seems fairly significant to you.

And what brought him here is why you feel so terrible.

You know it isn’t fair. You know it isn’t politically correct. It’s not good and it’s not fathomable, to feel the way you do about him. It’s not his fault that he’s this way and you don’t need to know the details. You know how Virus and Trip always made you feel when they would talk to Aoba. You can deduce for yourself how terrible that year in captivity must have been, and Aoba doesn’t know that a lot of it is for him — he doesn’t know that your motivation to kill Virus and Trip is sometimes less for Noiz and more for him. 

Your motivation to kill at all is realer than Aoba knows, to be fair, but Virus and Trip are a special case, now.

You hate yourself for it. You really do. You despise that you’re so disgusted by Noiz, but you can’t help it. You never leave your room because you can’t stand to look at him. If you don’t look at him, you can’t be revolted; if you can’t be revolted, you can’t hate yourself for being the worst human imaginable. 

Not to mention that you miss your friends.

Things between you and Aoba and Mizuki haven’t been normal in months. It’s been forever since the last time you can remember having a relaxing night with them, and it’s been forever since the last time you brought a girl home to sleep with. This apartment was set up to do exactly that — romance girls and have sex with them. But now it’s set up to house an invalid that makes you sick to your stomach, and you haven’t gotten laid in two weeks.

Mizuki and Aoba insist that that’s on you — they never told you not to bring a girl home.

“But if I did, you’d be pretty annoyed,” you say with half-lidded eyes. You’re annoyed yourself. They can be such martyrs sometimes.

“Don’t decide our reactions for us,” Mizuki shrugs. “That just makes it harder on you.”

“What if you let us know before you bring a girl home?” Aoba asks. “That way we can put Noiz to bed and leave the apartment through the back door once you get home. She never has to know.”  
Mizuki raises his eyebrows in surprise. A disappointingly good idea from Aoba. You nod at him and that’s how you finally have sex in your own apartment for the first time in almost four months. 

 

“My roommate is asleep in the next room,” you tell her as you kiss her just before she leaves the bedroom to get a glass of water. “So try to be quiet. When you get back, however… Let’s just say, I want to see how loud you can get.”

She giggles. You don’t know her at all but she’s small and plump with red hair down to her shoulders and freckles across her forehead. She’s exotic and apparently is able to hold her liquor because you saw her do about six shots before you had the guts to get up and go over to speak with her. You turn to your dressing vanity and start to take out all the candles you can find. You haven’t had to do this in a while, so you don’t remember where you stashed them all. Hell, you think you got rid of some of them. You can’t remember.

You test every candle out before you light them to make sure there are no conflicting scents. Most of your candles are unscented for that very reason, but there’s nothing more off-putting than the smell of spermicide and lube and as much as you love to have sex, the smell of it is incredibly awful and you’re the first to admit that. A strong vanilla or jade scented candle can really mask that smell and make everything a little bit more comfortable. Basically, seduction is a science for you and the most important step is to find someone who wants to sleep with you whether you have scented candles or not. This girl wants to sleep with you. Now you want to make it worth her while.

You get nearly twenty candles placed strategically around the room and lit before you realize she’s not back yet. She’s taking an awfully long time getting water.

You leave your bedroom quietly and notice the light is on in the hallway bathroom. Noiz’s bedroom door across the hall is closed, and when you check the kitchen, no one is there. You’re left standing in the middle of the hallway, confused and biting your nails. Do you knock on the bathroom door? It would be fine enough if she was simply in there getting ready, but if it’s Noiz, you might startle him. There’s nothing you want less than to have to call Aoba and Mizuki while on your date and ruin the one chance you have at getting laid.

For better or for worse, you open Noiz’s bedroom door.

Your plan to stick your head in and out quickly is predictably naïve. Noiz is in bed. But he’s not lying down and he’s certainly not asleep.

He’s sitting straight up, his eyes on the door, wide and terrifying and your heart skips a beat. You actually gasp and clutch your chest when you see him. He looks like a monster in a movie and you’re frozen in horror for a good few seconds before you realize you can’t keep standing there. You let yourself in the room quickly and close the door behind you. The nightlight casts a soft light around the room and you press your back against the door.

“Noiz?” you ask softly. “What’s – what’s wrong?”

He doesn’t move a muscle. God, his eyes are huge. You’re absolutely horrified. 

“Noiz. Hey.”  
You shake your head and try to rack your brain for what Mizuki would do if he were here. You can’t let this girl come back to find you missing, but you can’t leave Noiz like this either… you think. Maybe he does this every night. Maybe he never sleeps. Maybe he’s always sitting straight up in bed like this, rooted in place and eyes bulging from his skull. He doesn’t look so much like a weasel anymore.

“I’m going to come closer, okay?” you say. You hesitate a moment and then you take a few steps forward… then another few… then another few. You reach the foot of his bed and you’re shaking in your sandals at how paralyzing his face looks. “I brought a girl home tonight. She’s in the bathroom across the hall. Did you hear her? Did that frighten you?”

It’s about all you can come up with. If he doesn’t do this every night, it must be because he heard two voices speaking, one he didn’t recognize, and didn’t know what to do. You’re about to tell him not to worry, but then he nods his head at you.

That’s the first time he’s ever reacted to you.

You bite down on your tongue. You’re sort of shocked. You’re sort of relieved. At least you know what’s wrong, but you don’t exactly have time to celebrate just yet.

“It’s okay!” you whisper. “She – she won’t stay long. We were just – on a date and I brought her home but she’s with me, okay?” He doesn’t reply. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

You suck in a stunned breath. He answered you. That’s the first time you’ve heard his voice.

“Okay!” you nod enthusiastically. A part of you is actually overjoyed, and not just for yourself. You didn’t know you could miss Noiz’s voice, but even a hushed, frightened whisper in the dark is encouraging to hear. “Okay. So… it’ll be okay. Okay? Just go to sleep. She won’t come in here.”

Noiz nods at you and you give him a thumbs up. You’re not sure why you do that, but you start to back towards the door hurriedly.

“I have to go get her now, okay? Just go to sleep.”

He still hasn’t lain back down by the time you leave the room, but you’re in a better position now than you thought you’d be when you first walked in. The bathroom light is still on so you start to pad quietly back to your bedroom – but then you have a second thought.

You turn around and approach the bathroom door, knocking on it quietly.

“Yes?” 

“How much longer do you think you’ll be in there?” It comes out a lot ruder than you intend it to. You smack yourself on the forehead. You’re sort of worried about Noiz and that pisses you off. Being worried about Noiz is cramping your style. “I mean, it’s fine, but… you know you’re absolutely beautiful. You don’t need to get ready for me.”

The door flies open and a perfectly manicured hand grabs you and pulls you inside. There are lips on yours and you don’t know how because that was possibly one of the worst saves of your entire life. You’re absolutely beautiful, you don’t need to get ready for me? What does that even mean? But you said it and she seemed to accept it. Bizarre.

She tells you that you’re handsome and the same applies to you, but she just wanted to make sure she left a good impression on you. But you’re too sexy and she has to have you now, and you end up getting stroked to hardness through your jeans in a matter of seconds. You thrust the bathroom door closed behind you and have to force yourself to stop thinking about Noiz. This probably isn’t the best idea. Sex noises coming from across the hall? This shouldn’t happen.

You tell her you have to go back to the bedroom, and she refuses. You remind her that your roommate is across the hall and she tells you that being heard is a huge turn-on for her and after all, didn’t you just say you wanted to see how loud she could be? You completely regret that choice of words now but she has your kimono off and your jeans unbuttoned so quickly that you start to think that the quickest way out of this is just to get it over with and fuck her right here in your bathroom. 

You pick her up by the waist and set her down on your sink. She spreads her legs easily and you pull her panties down, shoving her dress up far enough to get leverage against her skin and you push into her before you’re even completely ready to, but she’s egging you on and you are really hard and Noiz is just a few feet away and who knows how much he can hear – 

You put a hand over her mouth at one point and tell her to be quiet. She laughs heartily and nips at your fingers but you shove them inside her mouth instead.

“I’m serious. My roommate. If you don’t be quieter, I’ll pull out.”

Somehow, she takes you seriously. Actually, you don’t think she takes you seriously because she nods and winks at you as if you’re on a sitcom but the threat of taking your dick away is apparently enough to acquiesce to your wishes.

It’s the most frenzied and awkward fuck of your entire life, and you thank God that she’s on birth control when you come inside her, because you’re inexplicably turned on by the situation and orgasm much quicker than you expect. It’s the mix of how hot she is and how hurried you are and how worried you feel and how exciting it is that Noiz finally spoke to you. 

In fact, it’s Noiz that you’re thinking about throughout the majority of it, but it’s only you and her when you finally orgasm, for which you’re eternally grateful.  
She says that it’s the way you look when you come that makes her orgasm too just a few seconds after you, and you’re not sure you believe her. It’s the first time you’ve ever fucked while facing a mirror, and you caught a glimpse. You wince at her and she strips completely to take a shower before she leaves. You nod in acknowledgement and start to get dressed again, so you can go check on Noiz.

She won’t hear of it. She pulls you into the shower, still partly dressed, and makes out with you as she cleans your cum out of her vagina.

You can’t decide if tonight was heavenly or hellish by the time you’re both wrapped in towels and headed back to your room. She says she has to go because her mom can’t wake up in the morning to find her missing and you would be more worried about those implications if you weren’t so preoccupied with the fact that tonight has been one of the most bizarre nights of your entire life. In fact, you’re so distracted that it’s not until she stops rambling that you realize something is amiss. 

The sound of her voice disappears and you look around your bedroom to figure out what has her so shocked. Then you see it.

Noiz is in your bed, his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. Your blanket is draped over his shoulders and across his body and it isn’t until the girl starts screaming that you realize what this looks like.

You try to convince her that it’s not what she thinks but she doesn’t hear you. 

She rushes at Noiz with strong, closed fists and starts throwing punches. _Punches_. She starts hitting Noiz and you don’t remember what happens between the moment you realize she’s getting physical and the moment you step in between them. Well, you’re sort of lying awkwardly in between them. You dive onto the bed and shield Noiz from her hands, and you’d be doing a good job protecting him if she weren’t screaming at the same time.

Sometimes words can do more damage than fists – rarely. But sometimes.

It’s mostly unintelligible, but you definitely hear – which means Noiz definitely hears – “And who’s this cute little twink? Is this your boyfriend? What the fuck, are you gay?!”

She doesn’t seem to realize that she’s punching you instead of Noiz. She doesn’t seem to register you’re still in the room at all. It’s almost as if she’s having a break with reality, but you know the signs of a breakdown all too well by this point. You know them from experience. This girl isn’t having a breakdown. She’s just evil.

“Who’s this slut?” she shouts, grabbing your wrists and trying to throw you out of the way. You finally gain your balance and sit up on your knees, taking her by the shoulders instead and shoving her away from the bed. Her fists are still coming at you and you’re going to have the bruises later to prove it.

“It’s not what it looks like!” you scream at her. “It’s my roommate! He’s not my boyfriend!”

“I’m not a slut!”

That’s the first time you hear Noiz wail. He sounds like a baby and it’s so shocking to you that you turn around to stare at him instead for a moment in lieu of defending yourself. A good knock to the back of your head pulls you out of it though, and you turn back to the girl and step off the bed, scrambling for her hands and pushing her away from the bed.

“Get away from me!” Noiz continues. “I’m not a slut! I’m not a slut! Get off of me!”

“Is this some sick fetish for you?” the girl asks. “Fuck a girl and then go fuck a twink, too?”

You want to respond, but you’re still trying to piece things together. You’re not sure why she’s reacting so violently, and Noiz is sobbing from under your covers. You wonder how much shit like this he heard long before Virus and Trip – you know he has a fairly sordid sexual history, Mizuki told you that much – and how much of this is triggering something the yakuza freaks said to him. It doesn’t really seem their style, sexual insults like “twink” and “slut,” so you really can’t imagine that’s why he’s crying.

You accidentally pushed the girl a bit too hard when you understand it’s because of her fists that he’s crying.

“Get out of here!” you scream, your voice shriller than you thought it could go. “Get the hell out of here!”

She seems just as shocked as you were. Her eyes go wide but then she glares, lands one really good slap across your cheek, and storms out. You don’t really care. You just want her to leave.

“How dare you say something like that to another human being!” you shout after her. You even follow her to the front hallway to keep berating her. “You’re heartless! You’re callous! You – you’re – okay.” You sigh to yourself. The door has been slammed shut. “You’re gone.”

Noiz’s sobbing from the next room keeps you from standing in the hallway too long feeling sorry for yourself. You hurry back in and have no idea what to do to help Noiz, so you call Mizuki and Aoba immediately. They tell you they’re on their way, but you have to deal with Noiz in the meantime.

He’s still under your sheets, just a blob of red silk, heaving and blubbering. You wonder how much snot is on your bed by now. You don’t exactly want to touch him and you imagine going anywhere near him while he can’t see wouldn’t end up well for either of you. You do take one tentative step toward him and sigh.

“N-Noiz?”

One loud intake of breath responds to you. You have no idea what to say.

“Are – are you okay?”

All the air is let out in one, long sob. You worry that if you don’t react to this well, Noiz will go back into a catatonic state. In a way, this is sort of amazing. Noiz hasn’t given this much reaction to anyone ever, and you desperately hope you can find a way to keep him responsive.

“She didn’t mean what she said, you know,” you tell him. “I just met her tonight, I didn’t know she was so terrible. What she said wasn’t true. Do you need anything?”

You suspect what she said absolutely was true, really. Noiz is kind of a twink. He was also a bit of a slut from what you gathered when he and Mizuki were more serious. But you accept that you’re probably a bigger slut than he is, it just depends on how he feels about the word.

In any case, you aren’t going to mention it again. All you can think of to do at this point is keep shouting sweet reassurances from afar.

“I’ll come over and hug you if you want.”

A loud yelp, which you imagine is in protest.

“Okay!” you shout immediately. “I’ll stay here. You can cry as long as you need to… Noiz. Can you just… acknowledge that you hear me?”

A long pause abbreviated by punctured crying. You’re losing hope by the second. Maybe this was just a coincidental breakdown. Once he calms down, he’ll continue the way he was. He won’t say a word.

“I – I hear you.”

You breathe in sharply and almost start to cry.

You don’t deserve to be the one he talks to first. You don’t want to be that person. Maybe you forced his hand, by bringing home a girl who did this to him, and that makes you feel all the worse for it.

But he just spoke. He said something. You suppose that’s something you should be grateful for. You suppose that’s something Mizuki and Aoba will be grateful for. You also suppose they’re not going to be happy about being grateful for it, though.

 

When you tell them about it just an hour later, you sum it all up with, “She wasn’t exactly thrilled that there was a dude in my bed…”

They’re not thrilled with you either.

Of course, neither are you.

“She… just went at it,” you recount it to wide eyes and slack jaws. “Him, I mean. She just went at him. And she was screaming the whole time... and he just… sat there. He put his hands up but he just started wailing. He didn’t try to get off the bed and she was saying these terrible things… Mostly just calling him a slut but I’m pretty sure that’s more than enough to scar a person.”

Not that Noiz isn’t already scarred.

The incredible thing though, is that Noiz actually reacted. He did more than scream and flail; he actually spoke. He covered his head with his arms and hid in the blankets. And the minute Mizuki and Aoba showed up, he rushed to their sides and hid between them.

It’s like something clicked. He hasn’t said a word since you pushed the girl out your front door and hugged him close to you, but he didn’t pull away from you either.  
Mizuki has been berating you for an hour while Aoba and Noiz are alone in his room.

“You know, the only reason she came over was because you guys said it was okay,” you remind him angrily. “I was happy to stop bringing girls over here. You both told me to stop being a saint and just live my life. I tried, and here’s what happened. Exactly what I was afraid of.”

“Afraid of?” Mizuki asks. He’s not yelling at you but he’s decidedly unhappy. He keeps pacing the kitchen and scratching at his face and messing with his hair. “You’re not afraid of anything. You’re not afraid for Noiz. You don’t care.”

“Hey!” you bark. “Stop deciding my reaction for me, huh? Isn’t that what you said earlier? You have no idea how I feel. Don’t come in here and start throwing accusations around as if you’ve ever taken the time to ask me how I feel about Noiz.”

Mizuki stops pacing. You look over at him and he’s staring at you with furrowed brows and an open mouth. He’s sad. He’s looking at you sadly. You sigh and shake your head.

“I know… how hard this is for you guys,” you continue. “I get it. Aoba… considers him family, for whatever reason. And I know you had a… thing with him.” You point at the chair next to you, but he doesn’t sit down. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry that this is so hard for you two. But you just assumed it wasn’t hard for me, too. Emotionally, I mean. But it is. He and I didn’t get along, but… he didn’t deserve this. How could you possibly think I’d be okay with this?

How could you think… that I’d think that he’d deserve this?”

Mizuki does finally sit down across from you and wipes his eyes. He’s not exactly crying as much as he’s just tired from being awoken in the middle of the night and he’s alarmed for Noiz. You get it. You understand why this situation has turned your two best friends into different people. You only feel like shit that it didn’t do the same to you.

“It’s just that… I wonder sometimes if I’m partly responsible for this,” Mizuki tells you. You stare at him incredulously. You’re shocked.

“How on earth could you be responsible for this?” you ask. Mizuki shakes his head.

“I just wonder if he… went to Virus and Trip purposefully. I wonder how it happened, I think about it every day. Did Virus and Trip take him forcibly? Or did he go to them? And if he went with them… why did he do that? Was I not good enough for him? Was I not clear enough when I told him that I liked him? It feels like it might be my fault.”

You’re so appalled you can hardly speak. You assure him that it isn’t his fault and he sort of breaks down for a few minutes to cry.

Then he tells you all the reasons why he loved Noiz.

He was silly and charming and a little bit difficult to understand at times. He was different and illogical and eventually Mizuki learned that it was much more serious than simply a unique personality; he was abused and neglected and unaware of how he should be treated, and Mizuki was helping him unlearn all that and there was never anyone more deserving of love than Noiz. He was romantic and mushy and they’d only been on one “kind of” date before he’d disappeared – you learn that he was actually supposed to go on a date with him the day he left, and that puts things into a whole new light for you.

Mizuki calls Noiz handsome and sexy and erotic, and you actually laugh instead of retch. You roll your eyes, to be sure, and Mizuki stops just short of telling you exactly how his dick tasted when he gave him a blowjob, but you can appreciate it for the implications: Mizuki loves Noiz. But he’s not in love with him. And that’s what drives him so crazy. Maybe he would be in love with him at this point if things had been different, but – 

“Now you’re worried you might never get to be in love with him?” you ask.

Mizuki nods sadly and starts to cry again.

“This might be it,” Mizuki tells you. “Every time he so much as flinches, I get excited. I have to. It’s the only thing I have right now. The only thing I have to cling to is the hope that he’ll snap out of this one day and go back to normal. And even if he doesn’t… maybe one day it’ll at least be easier. Maybe one day, he can actually be with me again. But this will always be a part of him. Just like Morphine will always be a part of me.”

He shrugs and you take a deep breath.

You glance into the living room, at the spot on the couch where Noiz usually sits.

“It’s going to work out,” you tell him. For the first time ever, you realize just how much Mizuki needs you. “It’ll get better. It will.”

Mizuki sucks in a breath.

“I don’t think it will,” he says quietly. His voice is lost in the expanse of the room. He sounds so small and you turn to look at him in worry.

“Don’t say that,” you tell him. “You’ve always been on his side. Don’t give up now.”

“That’s the thing. I’m not giving up just now.” He wipes at his eye again with the back of his hand. “I gave up a long time ago. I just didn’t want you to know.” 

And that’s what scares you the most.

What if this is the end for Noiz? What if he never gets any better and he gets committed to a hospital for the rest of his life? What if he dies one day, whether it’s tomorrow or eighty years from now, and he’s never once been able to look you in the eye again? What if he’s never been able to open his mouth and speak to you once more? 

What if Noiz can never understand that you’re sorry? What if Noiz only ever regards you as the guy who treated him like shit? The guy who made him feel unwelcome?

What if Noiz can never forgive you?


	5. Mercy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pacify Reflect Mourn

You know logically that Noiz isn’t to blame. You know it’s really Virus and Trip’s fault. They’re the ones who did this to him. They’re the ones who broke him. They took him and they tortured him for an entire year and then they gave him back to you. To Aoba. To Mizuki. They did it on purpose and then bailed when it stopped being fun. You suppose they were trying to break him and you can’t decide if it’s admirable or stomach churning that Noiz lasted a whole year. You tend to lean towards stomach churning.

  
He’s been left in your care more and more, which is sort of surprising since you fucked up so bad the night you brought the girl home – but, undoubtedly, you are also the reason he’s started to react to people again.

You’re sort of proud of yourself, even if you didn’t mean to get him to come out of his state. Even if you did fuck up – really bad. It just managed to work out in your favor, as most things you do. It’s like your made of Teflon. Shit just doesn’t stick to you. And now, in fact, you’re a little determined to prove that you can take care of Noiz alone. You don’t need Mizuki and Aoba around all the time, which is good, because they can’t make it over for three days straight. You told them you didn’t need them. You’re the one who brought Noiz back from the precipice.

He’s no longer catatonic.

But he isn’t the same.

“Stop staring at me.”

You close your eyes softly and try not to get annoyed. He’s not trying to upset you. He’s not like before. He’s genuinely upset when people stare at him. You turn your head away from him and look toward the fireplace instead.

“Sorry,” you mumble. He shifts on the couch. He’s in his usual spot and he’s watching infomercials at three in the morning. He couldn’t sleep so he came to your room and you were still awake so you both came out here to watch TV. He doesn’t like to change the channels though; there’s something about the sound and the light that makes him flinch so you’ve been stuck on these paid-for-advertisements for an hour and a half now while he works up the nerve to switch to something else. It doesn’t bother you, really. There’s nothing on anyway.

  
His eyes flit from the screen to the remote. His fingers hover over buttons, determined to finally press one, but then you see the tic in his face as his lips flatten out and his eyebrows furrow. It’s the most emotion you’ve ever seen on him besides smug disregard; you sort of like it and you feel terrible for that. There’s a part of you that still harbors a grudge against him and it likes to see him nervous. It likes to see his hands shaking and his eyes terrified before you remember why he’s shaking and terrified. It’s just a split second of pleasure before it turns into disgust and remorse and guilt and you heave a great sigh from the back of your throat. Noiz, of course, thinks it’s about him.

“I’m trying,” he says through gritted teeth. You look over at him again and frown.

“I wasn’t sighing at you.”

Noiz grunts angrily, his finger finally mashing a button. The TV changes and Noiz shoves the remote on the floor, his hands flying up to cover his eyes. He whimpers slightly and your heart seizes up. You liked seeing him whimper but you also want to cry.

He snorts out his nose a few times, like punctuated curses he can’t seem to push from his lips and starts breathing quicker.

You don’t know what it is about changing the channel, but it seems to remind him of something and you wonder if he’ll ever get over it.

The therapist that Tae-san hired says yes, it’s possible, but you aren’t so sure. She asks you why you think that during one of your own sessions, and you can’t answer. You hired her to help you because of the immense guilt that racks your body on a daily basis but you still haven’t managed to tell her that yet. In fact, you don’t talk much at all when you meet with her, and the irony isn’t lost on you: Noiz doesn’t talk much either and now you’re not any better.

“Do you want me to feed you?” you ask Noiz the next night, when he can’t seem to lift his fork.

“Yeah,” he says. “Because I know you hate it.”

It sort of surprises you to hear him say so much. He rarely says anything unnecessary, so a lot of teasing and insults have been lost to the time. This is sort of new. You smile somewhat evilly.

“I hated wiping shit from your ass,” you tell him. He scowls and looks down at the table. You regret that this is sort of like the good old times. “Feeding you isn’t a problem after that.”

He doesn’t say another word as he struggles to open his mouth every time you lift the chicken to his lips. He isn’t from Japan, so he probably had trouble with chopsticks anyway before the incident. You’d make fun of him for that but you admit chopsticks probably can be a little odd if you aren’t used to them and it’s just not politically correct to make fun of an invalid, you suppose. He finally opens his mouth and you shove the first piece of chicken in so quickly you almost hit the back of his throat. He pulls away, grabbing your wrists and shoving your hands away. Before you can apologize, he starts to breathe so heavily that it actually frightens you.

“Please, don’t,” he begs. “Please, please, don’t. Please. I’ll eat. Please, don’t.”

He reaches into his soup with his hand, splashing it over the rim and onto the table. He grabs a handful of pork, seaweed, peas, everything that’s in the broth and crams it into his mouth as tears start to gloss over his eyes. You can’t breathe.

“Hey, calm down,” you tell him quickly, dropping the chopsticks and grabbing a napkin. The soup is hot. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, I’m sorry.”

“You’ve said that before,” he says through tears as he grabs more meat from his bowl and shoves it into his mouth.

“You’re going to burn yourself!”

“It’s okay, it doesn’t hurt. I can eat it!”

“Stop eating!” you cry. You realize the irony; you spent months getting him to eat real food and now you’re yelling at him to stop.

“It doesn’t hurt! Don’t make me do it!”

You stand up quickly, your chair scraping against the floor below you. You’re at a loss for words; Noiz starts to scream and dives under the table.

“Noiz—”

“I’m sorry!” he sobs from under the table. You take a few steps back in bewilderment to see that he’s curled up in the fetal position, his eyes buried into his elbows and his hands clasped behind his back. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’ll eat! I’ll do it! I’ll suck you off if you let me stay in bed tonight!”

Your eyes go wide and your nostrils flare as your heart starts to race. It beats so hard you think it might beat out of your skin and you swallow hard, trying to figure out what to do. You’re freaking out – Noiz is freaking out – everyone here is freaking out and you don’t know how to fix it.

You gulp down some air into your lungs as you look around the room in helplessness. Noiz is shouting the entire time.

“I’m sorry! Please don’t take that thing out! I don’t want to go back in it! I don’t want to go back in it! I’ll eat my food, I promise!”

Usually, you’d call Aoba and Mizuki at this point. You _could_ call Aoba or Mizuki at this point. One of them would be able to talk him down. But you don’t really want to. You want to prove that you know what you’re doing. You want to show them that you can fix this on your own.

You don’t know why, but you do.

You drop to your knees and shove the chair out of the way. He screams at the top of his lungs.

“Noiz!” you shout. “Noiz, stop screaming!”

He doesn’t.

Aoba does this. Aoba just talks to him. It’s like he becomes a different person when he does it, but he just speaks and Noiz shuts up. You just have to say the right thing, you suppose.

“Noiz! I – uh… stop screaming! Noiz, it’s okay!”

The screaming continues. You swear you see a neighbor’s light go on from outside the window. You start to panic more.

“Hey!” you scream. “You are not with Virus and Trip! You are here, with me. It’s Koujaku! Stop screaming!”

You shout at the top of your lungs, and Noiz starts to sob quieter, but he sobs nonetheless. He still won’t look up and his hands are still firm around the back of his head. You pull yourself under the table a bit more.

“Hey, it’s Koujaku! I’m going to touch you, okay Noiz?”

And this is what Mizuki does. He touches Noiz. He has to get permission first, but Noiz has been letting him more often and he always seems to calm down every time Mizuki hugs him. You don’t know if that applies to you. Maybe your touch will just scare him more, but you suppose nothing’s going to make him worse than this. You couldn’t touch him when the girl made him cry. You just couldn’t do it. But now…

You grit your teeth and wrap your arms around his entire body. Your kimono drapes around both your bodies and his screaming starts to ramp up again so you shush him again.

“Hey,” you say quietly; much, much quieter than before. “Hey. Noiz. It’s okay.” You rock him slightly in your arms and then press your face against his, hugging him. You put your lips against his ears so he can hear you over his own sobs. “I’m not going to hurt you. No one’s going to hurt you. You don’t need to scream. Noiz?”

It stops all at once. Noiz’s voice completely vacates the room and his entire body goes limp in your arms.

He falls against your shoulders and you have to hold him tight to keep him in place.

“Noiz?” you ask softly. “You okay?”

This is bizarre. You suppose nothing surprises you anymore, but there was never a time in your life that you thought this would be happening. You and Noiz, connecting? Hugging Noiz? Touching him at all? No way. Noiz was the snotty brat you absolutely despised but now he’s crying under your kitchen table and you just want him to be okay.  
That sort of touches you. You don’t even necessarily wish for him to get better, that would be too obvious. Anyone would wish for him to get better.

You want him to just be okay. You hope that, one day, Noiz will be okay.

He doesn’t answer you right away. His hand creeps up and his fingers clench your kimono tightly. You notice there are stains on the fabric from his tears. He pulls at the hem and takes in a breath so deep that it punctures with sobs every few seconds. You close your eyes slowly and decide against pulling away when he tightens his grip even more, crying into your shoulder even harder, and situating himself in your lap even further.

“Gay,” he snivels quietly between breaths.

You stroke his hair for nearly an hour as he calms down. Neither of you say a word, not even you, to insist that you’re not gay. If anything, you’re bisexual. You don’t know. Noiz always seemed to know more about that kind of stuff. Maybe he knows what you are.

You finally crawl out from under the table with him after what feels like an eternity and reach back to help him out. He wipes his eyes angrily and you put an arm around his shoulder. Not because you want to touch him more, but because for all these breakdowns and petty insults, he still can’t get himself around on his own.

“Come on,” you say. “I’ll get you to bed. Do you want a bath today?”

He nods barely and you lead him to the bathroom. You sit him down on the closed toilet lid while you fill up the tub and just as you’re making sure it’s not too hot, you remember that it doesn’t matter.

You’d gotten a little angry that Mizuki and Aoba expected him to stay with you but neglected to make sure you knew about his condition for so long. You’d only found out about it two weeks into Noiz’s stay and you still sort of forget. The water needs to be warm, but it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect. Noiz can’t tell. In fact, the only place he can feel any sensation is –

You wince to yourself as you’re flicking water off your hand into the tub after checking the temperature. The only thing he could feel the entire night was the food he shoved into his mouth. You can’t believe you forgot about that.

“Hey,” you say, turning to him. His head doesn’t move, but his eyes look up at you like you imagine a puppy’s would. “Is your mouth okay?”

He looks away angrily and barely nods his head. You frown at him and then look at the bathwater again.

“I guess I’ll get you in here and then let you bathe. I’ll just undress you to your boxers and you can take those off in the tub if you want.”

You take a step toward him when his head rolls up and he looks you in the eye. It’s so sudden and active that you stop in your tracks.

“Can I sleep with you tonight?”

You’re shocked. Apparently the hug under the table wasn’t too much for him after all.

Still, you don’t know what to say. That is not exactly the kind of relationship you’ve ever had with him. You turn back and regard him carefully. He won’t look you in the eye, so it’s a little difficult to see if he’s serious or if he’s just about to make another joke about your sexuality. But he remains quiet, so you think he’s serious.

“Is that… okay?” you ask sincerely. “Can you do that?”

He shrugs, though just barely.

“Maybe not.”

You roll your eyes in frustration. It would really probably be best if he just slept in his own bed.

“Well… why me?”

“Mizuki isn’t here.”

You look at the bathtub again. You have no idea what to do. You don’t know if he can handle being in the same bed as someone else. You know that the hug calmed him down and that should be a good thing, but sleeping in the same bed as someone else might be too much. Something tells you that he needs to sleep alone.

But another part of you can’t just deny him this.

“Have you slept with Mizuki before?”

He doesn’t answer. You don’t understand why at first, but when you rethink your question, you realize it was sort of open-ended. He wants to know if you meant before Virus and Trip or before tonight. You take a deep breath. Your mouth is so dry.

“I mean… have you slept with him before tonight. As in, since you’ve… been home.”

“Home?”

You turn sharply to meet his eyes. He’s looking up at you too, and you shake your head slightly. Home. This isn’t Noiz’s home. Your nostrils flare as you try to stymie a grimace.

“I just meant… since we found you.”

He doesn’t answer for several seconds and you actually feel your heart fall through your feet. You’ve never really realized that this isn’t Noiz’s home. You’ve known that, but it never really stuck. All of this happened to him somewhere that he isn’t even from and you always suspected he had a bad family history but you didn’t really care. Everyone does. He wasn’t special to you so you didn’t really want to hear it. But now the guilt creeps into your chest again and you almost sneer at yourself.

“Mizuki slept in the same bed as me. Just to be near me. Without sex.” His sentences are cut short by desperate breaths, but he seems oddly confident suddenly. His posture hasn’t varied from slouching since you set him down. “He protected me.”

You skip right past the fact that those are the most words he’s spoken ever, and go right to the obvious question:

“You think I’ll protect you?”

“No,” he says immediately. You feel an energy as you stare at him that you’ve never felt before. It’s a bad one. But it’s invigorating at the same time. “I just don’t think you’ll actively hurt me. Help me into the bath.”

You don’t argue. You simply watch him strip his underwear off and then you maneuver him into the tub, covering him in water and washing his hair for him.

You’re pulling Noiz out of the bath twenty minutes later when he slips from your hands. You groan and try to catch him but he falls to his hands and knees, then slides backwards onto his ass and leans his back against the tub. He’s hard to hold onto when he’s wet; you actually lose your grip on him quite often. He sits there sullenly, and you sigh into your hands. You turn to the towel rack and grab the clean one, trying to unfurl it clumsily in your hands as you turn back to Noiz.

At first you think it’s just the towel itself unrolling in your hands when you feel a tug on your jeans, but after the second, more forceful pull against your fly, you grunt and almost slip right on top of Noiz.

“H – hey!” you cry, dropping the towel immediately as Noiz unzips your jeans hastily. You grab his hands and try to stop him but he’s unnaturally strong suddenly. “What are you doing?!”

He doesn’t answer you; no surprise there. The surprise really is coming from the physical though, not the verbal. He pulls you toward him and you end up with your legs on either side of his body, your hands bracing yourself against the tub as you lean down unceremoniously against Noiz’s face. You stare down at him and he actually manages to start pawing at your dick through your underwear before you can catch your breath long enough to stop him.

“Stop!” you shout, careening out of his grip and toppling backwards onto your own ass.

Bad move.

Noiz crawls towards you instantly, managing to get your dick out of your underwear as you slide around on the wet bathroom floor like a slug. You fall back and crack your head against the wood floor, crying out in pain and grabbing the injury; all the while Noiz is trying to jerk you off. You imagine that your unfortunate, growing arousal is not deterring him any.

“Noiz, what the hell are you doing!” you scream, one hand still on the back of your head and the other reaching out to push his face away. He finally looks up at you and meets your eyes, his own dead and unaware.

“I’m doing what you told me to.”

His lips actually manage to find their way around your cock before you can stop him and you hate how immediately you cry out in gratification. He has a tongue piercing. You’ve never been sucked off by someone with a tongue piercing.

But that’s about the only part of this that’s getting you harder. You tug at your kimono and try to throw it over your dick.

“I never asked you to do this!”

Noiz’s lips pop off your dick for a moment and you take the opportunity to fully cover yourself. You even back up all the way to the sink and sit up, pulling your jeans back up as he stares at you on all fours.

“I know you didn’t.”

You shake your head, completely frazzled and bewildered.

“Why did you say I did, then?”

“You never ask me to do anything. You order m—”

He cuts himself off there, his eyes suddenly lighting up. They widen, and he shakes his head slightly as he leans up onto his knees. It’s like he’s just realized something, and you’re deathly afraid that you already know what it is. You don’t know what triggered him, but he was back there. He was with Virus and Trip just now, and he wouldn’t have recognized the name ‘Koujaku’ to save his life.

He’s completely naked and still dripping wet, his own dick so hard that it’s pointing toward the ceiling. You look away immediately and whimper to yourself.

“Noiz,” you ask softly, your eyes looking anywhere but his naked body. “Are you okay?”

He doesn’t answer you after that. Instead, he scrambles for the towel and covers himself up, then screams at you to leave the room. You do as you’re told, assuming the previous conversation is null and void now, but then he shows up in your room twenty minutes later, dressed and ready for bed.

You figure not mentioning what just happened would be best.

You never thought you’d be falling asleep next to Noiz in your entire life, and you can imagine that if you had, you’d be pretty certain you’d be angry about it. But you’re not. You’d nodded to him slowly in the bathroom and left; he entered your room half an hour later in so many layers of clothes that you worried he might overheat in the night. You didn’t say anything though; Aoba and Mizuki probably set those pajamas out for him before they left. He finally slips under the covers with you and turns away. He can’t look you in the eye. You sit up a bit to turn the light off.

“Wake me if you need something,” you tell him, though you don’t know why. He already knows that, and he never has. He doesn’t answer and you turn the light off, resting your head back on the pillow and closing your eyes.

You won’t admit the next morning that you slept better that night than you have in days. You definitely won’t admit that you actually felt safer, too.

-

Noiz didn’t deserve what he got. Noiz is a jackass who came into your life and started ruining things one by one, but he wasn’t a terrible person. He wasn’t morally corrupt or ethically ambiguous, he was just a kid who had a shitty life and didn’t know how to react to it. He was, ironically enough, never capable mentally of what Virus and Trip were. He’d never do to someone else what they did to him. He was just a brat. He didn’t deserve to be reduced to this.

Noiz isn’t in bed when you wake up the next morning. He’s sitting in his spot on the couch, staring at the blank TV screen. When you say good morning, he doesn’t react whatsoever. You close your eyes in despair and make some coffee.

He isn’t better.

Aoba and Mizuki both come back later that day. You decide not to tell them about the night before. Noiz might not want them to know. If he was able to dive under the table and try to suck you off and ask to sleep in your bed, then he should be able to tell them if he wants them to hear about it. You make dinner for the four of you, but take your bowl into your room and sit in the lounge chair in the corner. You prop your feet up on the footstool and try not to remember how soft your mother’s hair was or how she smelled like jasmine. She’d be comforting right now. But you don’t get to be comforted by her anymore, so there’s no point in thinking about her in the first place.

  
Something haunts you about the night before. There’s something so wrong about it. There’s something wrong about Noiz’s breakdown followed by the insatiable need to be close to someone. You don’t know why. Maybe it’s because you know it’s not sustainable. If that’s what he needs in order to live a normal life, he’s fucked. That’s not a normal life in the first place. Screaming and crying underneath a kitchen table is not a normal life and not even Mizuki would be able to keep up with that. Not even Mizuki, who is possibly more in love with Noiz than you’ve ever seen him in love with anyone, would be able to take care of Noiz like that for the rest of his life.

  
You wonder if that’s fair. Is it okay to say that Noiz can’t be normal? Is it okay to think anything is normal or abnormal? There are surely other people who live their lives the way Noiz does; other people have been traumatized and experienced years of terrible things and lived. Is it okay to say that Noiz doesn’t deserve to be taken care of?  
But that’s not what you’re saying, you realize. Noiz deserves to be taken care of. He just doesn’t deserve to be in a place where he _has to_ be taken care of.

It’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate that bad things happen to not-that-bad people. It’s a difficult pill to swallow, but Noiz can’t swallow at all, and you’re starting to realize the grimmest reality of this situation: **Noiz would have been better off dying.**

Maybe the timing of this epiphany is weird. Maybe you’re just thinking this because he seems to be getting better. But if this is getting better, then you hate to find out what his baseline is going to be. What is Noiz going to be like for the rest of his life? Screaming under tables for God knows what reason? Crying when someone touches him but then begging to sleep in the same bed as them a few hours later? Unable to even eat or change the channel on his own? Mizuki wouldn’t be able to handle that. He was too invested in Noiz before, but he’s even more invested in him now. Aoba is too, and you can only see their lives getting harder and harder as Noiz continues to plateau.

It feels like killing Noiz would be the merciful thing to do.

Of course, you don’t want to kill him. You would never do that. You simply wonder if he’d be happier, too. Maybe he’d be happier not existing at all. You sure feel that way sometimes. You remember feeling that way a long time ago, before you remembered you had Aoba…

You wonder if Noiz would help take care of you. Probably not. He’d probably let you live on the toilet and bring you a piece of bread three times a day. You actually smile at the thought. Noiz was a real shithead.

(You know deep down that he’d do anything he could to care for you, if only because Mizuki would probably force him).

A few hours later, Mizuki is helping Noiz to the bathroom so you put on a movie before they come back. That way, Noiz doesn’t have to hear or see the TV turn on. Mizuki wants to sit with him on the couch but Noiz doesn’t answer when he asks if it’s okay, so Mizuki takes the seat next to him gingerly – and with extreme sadness, you notice – and makes sure to sit far enough away not to touch him. The chair you’re sitting in makes it easy enough to peek at them out of the corner of your eye and you can tell Mizuki isn’t paying attention to the movie at all. He’s too distressed, wanting to touch Noiz after having been away from him for three days, but Noiz doesn’t seem to even know he’s there.

You don’t know why he changes like this. He talked to you last night. You don’t know why he can’t talk now, or why he can’t acknowledge Mizuki’s presence. Part of you wonders if Mizuki should do what you did – touch him whether he says he can or not. That’s how it happened last night: you told him you were going to touch him, and then you did. You hugged him close like you never thought you would and then he cried. He even held you back. He hasn’t done either of those things with Mizuki yet, and you know it’s wearing on him.

Maybe it would be better for Mizuki eventually too, if Noiz just stopped existing.

“Would you mind if I spent the night again?” Aoba asks a few hours later. Mizuki is putting Noiz in the bath and you perk up.

“Only if you sleep in my bed with me.”

Aoba smirks at you in annoyance but nods anyway.

“Sure, just don’t push me off with your big, hippo body.”

You have feelings for Aoba and you always have. You were best friends from such an early age that it was easy to confuse how you felt and difficult to discern what was different between him and Mizuki. And it was Noiz who finally made you admit it to yourself: you’re attracted to Aoba – romantically and sexually. Maybe you’re only attracted to Aoba sexually because you’re attracted to him romantically, but your thoughts are nothing but what it would be like to kiss Aoba goodnight or cuddle him to sleep. He sleeps with his face away from you, just like Noiz did, but for some reason, it doesn’t feel the same as when Noiz was here.

You wanted Aoba to sleep with you so that you could feel safe again, like you did last night. You wanted to get a good night’s sleep again, which is so rare – so rare – for you nowadays. But you’re more keyed up than ever with Aoba in your bed, far more anxious than the first time he slept with you. You have to get up two hours after everyone else falls asleep and pad quietly into the kitchen to get some water. Your throat is dry and your nerves are shot and you need something to tire you out. Maybe fretting at the kitchen table will calm you down more than fretting in bed with Aoba.

Noiz has already beaten you to it.

“Mizuki.”

That’s all he says to you. At first you think he’s confusing you for Mizuki, and that’s a bit worrisome. He’s sitting at the table, a blanket draped around his body. It is pretty chilly in here, but you don’t know why Noiz is concerned about that. Then you realize: Mizuki’s head is in his lap; his body is stretched between two other chairs, and he’s covered in a blanket, too. Noiz wanted to come out here, you gather, but Mizuki wouldn’t let him be alone. You nod in acknowledgement of his words and get yourself a glass of water and sit down across from them. Noiz is staring at the table. You’re staring at Noiz.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper softly. “By the way. I… just… I’m sorry.”

Noiz doesn’t move a muscle. He’s still staring at the table.

“For… the girl.”

His eyes flit up to meet yours but he remains silent.

“I was trying to get laid. I didn’t know she was nuts. And I just… I’m sorry.”

You’re sorry for so much, really. You’re sorry that you hit the back of his throat with a chopstick last night. You’re sorry that you let the girl fuck you in the bathroom across from Noiz’s room when you knew he was already awake and nervous. You’re sorry that she screamed at him and said the things she did, even if that wasn’t your fault.  
You’re sorry that he can’t eat or talk or walk or sleep without someone’s help. You’re sorry that he can’t decide if he’s okay. You’re sorry that he can’t discern the difference between being able to take care of himself and just being able to live. You’re sorry that something happened to him in his childhood that made him the way he is. You’re sorry that it probably led him to Virus and Trip and you’re sorry you couldn’t stop them.

  
You’re sorry that you killed your mother. You’re sorry that you couldn’t kill Ryuuhou too and you’re sorry that Virus and Trip are still out there, alive, when they should be six feet under, like your mother. You’re sorry that your father beat you and you mother so much before you finally killed him, too. You’re sorry that people had to die but it wasn’t the right people. You’re sorry that Virus and Trip aren’t dead. You’re sorry that you haven’t been able to kill Virus and Trip yet. You’re sorry that Virus and Trip are still alive, you’re sorry that they’re out there and you’re a killing machine and you kill people but you can’t kill them, all you want is to kill people but you can’t kill the people you want to kill.

You’re sorry that you thought it might be kinder just to kill Noiz.

You’re sorry that you still think that might be true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Act II


	6. Misericorde

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Connect Join Sever

“Stop. Staring. At. Me.”

  
Noiz has two scars that weren’t there before. That’s what Mizuki tells you at least, and you can’t believe you didn’t notice. Then again, it’s not like you spent a lot of time studying his face before so maybe you can believe it. He does have nice skin and you always kind of admired it, but it’s less his skin that has you surprised you didn’t notice and more the location of the scars: one on his bottom lip, slicing from the middle right down to his chin, and the other on his nose. Right across the bridge. It’s not quite as long or deep or in the exact same spot as yours, but it’s over the bridge. The curve of his nose.

You know that a blade doesn’t naturally cut skin like that.

You know that a sharp edge can’t be swung haphazardly and still get a slash that clean.

You know that the only way you can give a person a scar like that is to hold them down and slice them open on purpose.

It’s not that hard to remember the day that your father did it to you, even though you try very hard to keep that locked away in its own little room in the back of your brain. A nice, neatly packed room, full of your father and his abuse. Your father, the yakuza. How ironic.

You don’t mention it to Mizuki or Aoba. You imagine it might come across their minds eventually – or maybe it already has, and they simply haven’t mentioned it. It’s not that hard to realize the logistics of knives and curves of the body. It’s not exactly advanced mathematics. But if they haven’t realized it yet, you’re certainty not going to be the one to upset them with it.

You can’t help but stare at Noiz’s scar when you’re alone with him.

“Sorry,” you groan in frustration. Noiz is always annoyed with you for staring at him, but you never realize you’re doing it. You’re more frustrated with yourself than you are with him, really. You have to pull yourself together. It’s difficult though, when you’re still so racked with guilt that it takes all your energy just to get out of bed in the morning to face Noiz again.

Sometimes you wonder if you should say something.

You wonder if some of your guilt would be alleviated if you tried to talk to him.

Maybe if you tried to connect with him, you’d feel a little better. Maybe even a bit more hopeful. If you could find some way to relate to him, you might find a bright side to all this. A silver lining. He hasn’t spoken much since the day he slept in your bed, but he did hold Mizuki’s hand at dinner two nights ago. But a conversation – a real, honest conversation – might make things seem more optimistic.

“I know how you got that scar.”

Noiz blinks slowly. His eyes travel from the TV screen to the ceiling and you sort of bite your bottom lip. You know that’s not the best subject to pick, but you have to talk about it. Some part of you desperately wants to connect to Noiz. You want to feel better. You want to feel like Noiz doesn’t need to disappear to make things easier. You need to feel some sort of absolving of your sins, and you don’t know how to get it. You never have.

“The one on your nose. I recognize it. You might understand that already. I know that blades don’t just slide across the bone like that. They have to be dragged across. Carefully.” You pause. “Planned.”

His eyes drop to the floor. You lean forward in your seat toward him and cover your mouth with your hands for a moment as you think of what to say next. Not too much. Don’t upset him. Don’t remind him. Just let him know you understand.

“It’s not going to happen again. No one is going to hurt you now. But I know how they did before because I have the same scar.”

He’s completely immobile. You drop your hands between your legs and check over your shoulder for Mizuki or Aoba. They’re not in the dining room, so you lick your lips and continue:

“It’s okay if you still think about it sometimes. I do. The panic attacks go away after a while. I can’t say it’s all perfect now, but… it’s not quite as urgent as it used to be. The need to react to it, I mean. You get to a point where… it’s all just a very quiet hum. Constant, maybe, but quiet. And it’s so constant that you get used to it. It becomes the new normal.”

You don’t quite know what you’re saying anymore. You’re not sure how this is helping him, but he’s not starting to breath quickly or blink rapidly, so at least it’s not causing him to panic.

“Anyway… I don’t know if it’s a yakuza thing. But we’re connected by these, you know. Mine was from a yakuza, too. So… it’s okay. I know. I know how you got that scar.”

“No.”

The word comes confidently and loudly from Noiz’s lips. You don’t react much, other than to fold your fingers into each other.

“No?”

There’s a long pause before he answers:

“I know how you got that scar.”

At first you’re confused. You sit back in your chair and stare at him but he closes his eyes and tilts his head back to nap. You think hard about what he must mean and it comes to you slowly, piece by piece: your scar was the mystery. It still is the mystery. No one’s ever known what your scars are from and sometimes you don’t either. They’re not all from the same event: some are from your father abusing you and your mother; others are from the fateful day that you took the wrong revenge. But either way, no one’s ever really known how you got the scar across your nose. Noiz, on the other hand, came back with his. Everyone knew where his came from.

He was the one who figured out how you got yours, long before you realized how he got his.

When it happened, he must have realized. He must have seen his face in a mirror and recognized it: he looked like you. And he knew. He knew how he got the wound, and it clicked. That’s how you got it, too. Someone held you down and sliced you open, just like him.

He related to you long before you ever thought to do the same to him.

 

You test the waters. It’s probably fair to say it’s about time that the three of you consider what you’re going to do with Noiz and how you’re going to move on with your lives. Midorijima isn’t exactly the land of opportunity; you know the three of you never really had any big dreams for your lives, but you’re pretty certain you never planned on doing this.

“So… Noiz isn’t getting better.”

Mizuki closes his eyes in frustration and takes a deep breath. He stops typing on his laptop and licks his lips.

“Why would you say that?”

“I just mean… what’s… the plan?”

Mizuki swivels his head to you. He looks annoyed. He blinks at you but then looks away in understanding.

“You don’t want him here anymore?”

“I just wonder the timeline.”

“I don’t know the timeline. No one knows the timeline. It’s not a common situation. No one knows when he’s going to get better.”

Mizuki has been your friend for so long. He’s the only friend you feel as close to as you do Aoba. Hagime and Kou and others from Beni Shigure are great, but Mizuki and Aoba are your best friends. And Mizuki… he’s a good person. He can be annoying and lush and violent, but he’s a good person. He didn’t deserve this any more than Noiz did.

“And what if… Noiz doesn’t get better?”

He doesn’t deserve that. He doesn’t deserve to hear that. He doesn’t deserve to be reminded that the guy he fell for may never be the same again. But you had to say it, and you wonder if it’s because you really don’t have a heart.

“I don’t know, Koujaku,” he challenges, squaring his shoulders to face you. “What if he doesn’t?”

“Come on,” you plead. “You understand though, right? This is all happening in my apartment… Maybe we should look into getting him his own place?”

“And making a schedule for us to come by and take care of him?”

“What if we get him a live-in nurse or something?”

“I thought that was just a porn thing. I don’t think those are real.”

You frown and think it over for a moment.

“No, I’m pretty sure they’re real.”

“Really?”

You consider it again.

“No, I’m… yeah. Yeah! You can get a healthcare professional to live with him and take care of him. That’s what they do with old people.”

“No, they just put old people in retirement homes.”

“No, that’s only when they really can’t take care of themselves anymore – wait, is there like, a retirement home for kids? Or for… younger people?”

Mizuki winces at the reminder of just how young Noiz is. He’s still basically a kid. A kid, and this much of his life has been robbed from him already.

“I mean, isn’t that just the hospital?”

“I guess so.”

“It doesn’t matter what we do, what matters is how are we gonna pay for it?”

“We can just… pitch in, I guess.”

“You think the three of us make enough money to pay someone with medical background to take care of our nearly-catatonic friend.”

You sit back in your chair. You don’t remind him that Noiz isn’t exactly your friend. But he’s right – you have no idea how expensive it would be to pay for an apartment and care for him. And you also aren’t sure if you should be the one expected to front money for it.

“Maybe we can set up a fund.”

“A fund?” Mizuki seems extremely skeptical.

“Yeah, like… people donate.” You shrug. “Maybe we could get enough money. Wheel him out, make people feel sorry for him.”

“Koujaku, you have said some repulsive things before, but that’s pretty much the lowest thing I’ve ever heard.”

You glare at him. He’s right, though.

“I guess he can’t be in crowds, anyway,” you mutter. Mizuki punches you so hard in the shoulder that you feel it two days later when you bring up the same subject to Aoba.

“I just don’t know how much longer this is realistic,” you tell him. “It’s unsustainable. We can’t keep living like this and Noiz needs his own place.”

“What if…” Aoba looks down at the table and furrows his brows. Aoba is much more likely to give the situation careful consideration than Mizuki is. They both act out of some emotional response when it comes to Noiz, but Aoba’s seems to be a bit more practical. Brotherly, even. “What if we all move in to one place and live together?”

“We basically already do,” you say quickly, before you realize that the idea of officially living with Aoba is very appealing. There’s no way you could afford a four-bedroom place. Maybe you and Aoba would have to bunk up in the same room… or the same bed.

“And I don’t know if I could leave Granny,” Aoba sighs. You sigh, too. Better to kill that dream before you got too attached to it.

“We can’t keep living like this,” you tell him. Aoba frowns at you in understanding.

“I know,” he says quietly. He’s so mournful that you want to take it all back. You hate seeing Aoba sad more than anything. “But… you do whatever you have to for family.”

That line of thinking has always been a little fuzzy for you. You don’t really remember what it’s like to have even one family member worth laying down your life for, but you also know you’d do anything in this earthly world to bring her back.

 

The decision is made to move Aoba and Mizuki into your place a bit more officially. Aoba doesn’t have to worry about paying rent, so he’s the first to bring a large trunk of his stuff over. He lugs it in the front door and it takes all three of you to force it on its side and push it down the hallway into the living room where Noiz is sitting in his usual spot.

It’s not going to fit through your bedroom door, so he’ll have to unpack in the living room and move everything from there. It’s the only room with enough space and a doorway large enough to allow the trunk through.

The three of you are exhausted by the time you manage it into the living room and you slide down against the wall, your forehead covered in sweat. Good thing you wore a t-shirt and shorts today instead of your kimono. Mizuki, however, still hasn’t listened to reason about his impossibly tight leatherwear, and is rubbing his face against the glass door to your porch. Aoba heads into the kitchen to get a pitcher of water and you kick the trunk down onto it’s bottom. It lands with a massive thud! and you look over at Noiz.

He’s staring at the TV, as if nothing’s happened. It’s some repeat of a sitcom he kind of likes, but you know it’s been on the same channel for six hours. The remote is underneath his hand, another grim indication of his mental stagnation. Nothing is getting better.

“Why does he need such a big trunk?” Mizuki mutters, walking over from the door to inspect the trunk. It’s old and made of metal; it’s fairly heavy on its own but you probably could have managed it alone if it had been empty. Aoba is a heavy packer – he always has been.

“I think it’s a family thing,” you say, taking one last deep breath and nodding toward your bedroom. “I have family heirlooms, too. They’re a bit smaller than this, though.”

Mizuki looks up at you and you know why. He doesn’t have any family heirlooms because he doesn’t have any family. He raises his eyebrows and puts a foot on the corner of the trunk. He shoves it back and it scrapes against the hardwood floor.

That’s when it happens.

“No!”

You and Mizuki turn in shock. Mizuki actually grips the chest of his shirt. You both stare at Noiz with wide eyes as he starts to recoil onto the couch. It’s like he’s imploding into himself and everything starts go in slow motion. You know what’s about to happen. You flashback to under the kitchen table, the lost night; the night you never told Mizuki and Aoba about. You hate that you’ve gotten used to this. You hate that it’s a thing.

“What’s wrong?” Mizuki says, his face intensely worried. He doesn’t take a single step toward him. This is common for Mizuki, too. He already knows the drill.

Aoba comes running into the living room in time to see Noiz recoil up into the couch, pulling his knees up to his chest and eventually toppling over the arm. You rush toward him but he shoves the couch forward and starts to crawl behind it. How the fuck is he that strong?

“Noiz, don’t do that,” you chide, but he’s creeping behind the couch the best he can, sobs beginning to escape his mouth. It’s like a wind-up toy; he always starts quietly and ramps up and you’re already dreading it. You drop to your knees and crawl toward him too, holding out a hand to stop him. “Noiz, come out from behind the couch.”

“Please don’t put me in it!” He’s screeching and crawling like a child, trying to wedge his way between the wall and the couch. You wish he didn’t look so silly because you know this is serious, but he’s like a cat that thinks he’s hidden just because he can’t see the three of you. It’s not a very good hiding job.

“Put him in what?” Aoba asks hoarsely, and that’s when you really pick up on what he said. _Please don’t put me in it_. You haven’t been able to piece a lot of Noiz’s triggers together yet, but this one seems fairly simple.

“Get that trunk out of here!” you shout at Mizuki, who seems to have put it together at the same time. He’s already motioning for Aoba to get the other side and they both work as quickly as they can to push it out of the room.

“I didn’t do anything wrong this time,” Noiz rambles into his hands. “I didn’t do it, I didn’t cry this time, just like you asked. Please don’t. Please don’t put me in it. I stayed right here just like you told me to and I never cried, please, I did what you said.”

It’s too rote. It’s too rote to be upset and try to imagine what Virus and Trip did to Noiz to make him react like this. You put your hand out to touch his back.

“Noiz, it’s Koujaku. I’m going to rub your back, okay?”

You touch him. You hear Aoba and Mizuki struggling and Noiz screams. You take your hand away immediately.

“I’m not going to rub your back!” you shout. “I take it back! I’m not going to touch you! Don’t get upset! No one’s going to hurt you!”

“I thought I did everything you wanted!” he screeches. You sigh loudly. “Please tell me what to do! I’ll do whatever you want if you don’t put me in there again!”

You rub your face wearily. You don’t know how to convince him that you’re not here to hurt him.

“The trunk is gone, Noiz!” you tell him. “It’s me! It’s Koujaku! I’m not going to put you anywhere except on the couch with a blanket or in the tub with warm water or to bed in clean pajamas!”

You’d say you have no idea what the hell is spewing out of your mouth, but you know it’s a maternal instinct. It’s things your mother told you after your father paid you both a visit and left you both bloody and hurting.

“Please stop screaming, Noiz! No one is going to hurt you!”

The screaming stops. The room is so full of tension that you don’t even know if Aoba and Mizuki are still in it. You’re too scared to move.

Noiz finally lifts his head and tentatively looks over his shoulder at you. He locks eyes with you.

Then his entire body falls limp and Aoba has to move the couch out more so that you can pull him from it and Mizuki takes him to his bed, cradling his head in his lap until he falls asleep an hour later.

“What do you think happened?”

Aoba is always a little more curious than Mizuki is. You imagine Mizuki is curious, but he doesn’t really want to think about it. Aoba seems to be able to stomach it a bit more. You shrug at him and rub your temples with your thumb and forefinger.

“I have no idea,” you mutter. “Obviously they put him in a trunk or something fucked up like that. Who knows why.”

“I hate it,” Aoba says. He’s upset, but not tearful. You nod.

“It’s disgusting,” you agree. “I swear. If we ever find them, I’ll be sure to kill them on the spot.”

Aoba regards you carefully. Maybe that sounded too genuine. But you’re not sure you care if Aoba knows you’re genuine about them; you don’t ever want him to know that you’re capable, but you don’t care if he knows that you sincerely want to kill them. You can stare back at him coldly, if a little vulnerably. You drag your hands down your face to cover your mouth and he licks his lip before he speaks:

“I used to be scared when you talked like that,” he says. “You seemed so serious.” You stare him down, almost challenging him to think you aren’t. “But now I’m not so worried if you are… in fact… I hope you are.”

You put your hands between your knees and stare longingly at him. You wish you could kiss him right now, and you can’t believe that he doesn’t know that. You can’t believe he can’t see right through you.

“Aoba?”

“Hm?”

“Do you think Noiz is ever going to get better?”

He winces.

“I don’t know.”

“Aoba?”

“What?”

“Do you?”

He sighs.

“No.”

You wish you could kiss him right now and you can’t believe he doesn’t know that.

“I don’t either, Aoba.”

 

Mizuki joins you finally. He’s smiling softly, as if there’s anything to be smiling about. He probably thinks it’s a good thing he just got Noiz to sleep, but Noiz wouldn’t need to go to bed at five o’clock on a Thursday if there weren’t so many bad things preceding it.

“He used to be so nasty and deviant,” Mizuki says. “But I always got to see the part of him that’s so innocent and sweet, too. It’s nice to see that part again. He turned over and looked me right in the eyes and then he smiled. It was so…”

Mizuki doesn’t finish his sentence. You want to grab his shoulders and yell, "But he tried to hide behind the couch in the first place! He’s sick! He needs help from someone other than us! And no one can help him! Is it even worth it?!”

“Look,” you say instead. Your two friends look at you anxiously and you take a deep breath. “We really need to talk about this.”

“Talk about what?”

Mizuki is already on the defensive. You understand that he has feelings for Noiz, but you’re starting to get annoyed by that. He so quickly doesn’t trust anything you have to say even though you’re the one without any bias.

“We need to talk about what we’re going to do with him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mizuki,” you groan. “Come on.”

“We’re moving in here, aren’t we?” he says angrily. “Wasn’t that the plan? Isn’t that why Aoba brought his stupid trunk over in the first place? Wasn’t our moving in why Noiz is screaming and trying to hide behind the couch to begin with?”

“Whoa,” you tell him. Now you’re really annoyed. “That’s illogical. You need to be here in order to help me take care of him. We all need to be together. If Aoba has to bring his stuff in a trunk, then he needs to do that and Noiz gets scared by the most mundane things and we can’t possibly know that ahead of time.”

“No, but we can take care of him afterwards.”

“We do!” you shout angrily. “We do something that triggers him and then we have to walk on eggshells for the next three days!”

“He can’t help that!”

“I didn’t say that! I just said that when something like a trunk sends him back there, what are we supposed to do?! We can’t know stuff like that! And you’re the one who tried to get in the tub with him at the start, but you want to yell at Aoba for having a trunk?!”

“Yeah!” Aoba says in his own defense. “That’s a family heirloom. Don’t blame the trunk.”

“I’m not blaming anyone,” Mizuki seethes. “It sounds like Koujaku is.”

“I am?!” you scream. “Who? Tell me who I’m blaming by pointing out that we need someone else to help Noiz.”

“Noiz! You’re blaming Noiz!”

“I’m not blaming Noiz for anything! That’s sick! How dare you suggest that I think it’s Noiz’s fault for being kidnapped and raped for a year!”

“Koujaku!”

Mizuki rushes you and delivers one punch to your mouth before Aoba can stop him. You push them both away and stand up from the couch to try to calm yourself.

“What the fuck was that for?!”

“Don’t say that! Don’t say it like that!”

“Come on,” Aoba says to you, his arms still keeping Mizuki from attacking you again. “Did you have to say it so graphically?”

You’re seeing red. You have to stay calm, but you’re so close to blowing up that you have to let something out. Something has to give.

“I did!” you scream. “I did have to say it graphically! I had to! Because that’s what happened to him! You guys try to pretend everything is fine and normal and okay and it’s not! That kid was kidnapped and raped for an entire year – by people that you called friends!” You point at Aoba and he lets go of Mizuki in an almost immediate revenge. Mizuki rushes you again but you’re ready this time. You brace your hands in front of you and block his first few punches. You spar with him enough to know what his go-to fighting stance is and you shove him aside.

“Fuck you,” Aoba says quietly. Mizuki gets in a good kick to your hip and then remains still, running his hands through his hair to try to calm himself as well.

“That kid was locked in a trunk,” you continue. “He was locked in a trunk and who knows what else! He was kept as a sex slave and punished when he didn’t obey. We have to accept that. We have to know that he just went through Hell and now he’s broken. He’s broken and we don’t know how to put the pieces back together.”

“Fuck you,” Mizuki says too, and you roll your eyes.

“We don’t even know if the pieces can go back together.”

“Fuck you,” Mizuki repeats, but Aoba seems to be giving up. He already admitted it to you. Mizuki is the only one who still seems to be under the illusion that Noiz is going to get better.

“He’s not going to get better, Mizuki,” you say finally. “What even is his quality of life?”

Something had to give.

Even Aoba seems shocked by you.

“Are you saying that it’s not worth it for him to…?”

Mizuki again doesn’t finish his sentence. Maybe it’s because it’s late and you’re tired or maybe it’s because this has been going on for months and you’re fucking tired, but you shrug your shoulders in defeat and watch them sadly.

“No,” you tell him. “I’m just saying it’s worth considering that killing him would almost be better.”

Complete silence.

You admit that might have come out the wrong way.

Mizuki is the first to blow up. It might be because Aoba seems more terrified than livid; Mizuki, however, has resolved to hit you again and boy, does he. You try to scream at him that you didn’t mean it the way he sounded, but he’s already screaming at you so shrilly that you can hardly make him out. You even let him continue to try to hit you because you want to try to hear what he’s saying.

“That’s fucked up! You’re fucked up! You are so fucked up! You are so fucked up, Koujaku! You want to kill a person because he was traumatized! You think it would be better off if Virus and Trip had just killed him! They already left him for dead and you just want to finish the job! I can’t even think of anything else to say because you are so fucked up don’t you ever go near Noiz again and if I ever see you touch him I will kill you with my bare hands don’t fucking try me Koujaku!”

“Get off him, Mizuki,” Aoba says coldly. You wrestle Mizuki away from you and push him into Aoba, who catches him deftly.

“I don’t mean we should kill him,” you tell him angrily. “I’m saying, how do you expect us to take care of a person who would be better off dead in the first place?”

Mizuki snarls and jumps at you again but Aoba pulls him back. That came out wrong, too.

“Get out!” Mizuki shouts. You roll your eyes again.

“Of my own apartment? Right? Right? This is my apartment, isn’t it? We brought him here. You moved in here. I’m the one who gave up my apartment for Noiz. I’m the one who’s always here.”

“Not anymore.”

Aoba’s voice is so cold and distant that both you and Mizuki pause to stare at him. It’s as if someone has completely has entered his body and you stare at him anxiously.

“From now on, I’m here. From now on, I’m the one who cooks his meals. I’m the one who helps him when Mizuki isn’t around. I’m the one who sleeps on a mattress in his room.”

You wince. Aoba won’t be in your bed anymore.

“You can sleep alone again,” he tells you and his eyes pierce you so deeply that you actually gasp. “Just like you want.”

He turns Mizuki out of the room.

“Don’t go near him,” he tells you. “Don’t even look at him.”

“Aoba –“

“I mean it. Don’t think about him. Don’t worry about him. That won’t be hard for you.”

You swallow hard as they leave the room together and you hear Noiz’s bedroom door open and close and you swear the lock turns and you lose yourself completely.

You crumple to the floor and sob.

You pull your hair in front of your face and try to hide within it, just like your mother used to let you do with hers. You cry so hard that you have to use your kimono to wipe away the snot and you know that they can hear you wailing. You know that Noiz can hear you. You know that Noiz hears you making the same sounds that he does when he breaks down.

You never really know what’s about to trigger Noiz. You never know what’s going to make him lose his bearings on the world. But for you it’s pretty easy: you kill everyone you love. You always have and you don’t know how to stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Act II


	7. Futile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guilt Repent Despair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Act III: The Lover

You have one hand wrapped around Noiz’s dick and are just about to start licking the head with the tip of your tongue. Just the tip… you’re going to tease him. He’s been dying to fuck you for months and you’ve been holding out for no good reason other than to mess with him, because you want to fuck him too. You wanted to fuck him the first day you met him. You thought you were going to, too. He certainly seemed down for it. But then you realized just how down for it he was and you decided fucking with him for a bit would be more fun for the time being than actually fucking him.

  
If you had known you didn’t have much time to fuck with him, you would have abbreviated the process.

You made him hold out for three months. He fucked other people, sure – so did you. But you didn’t let him see you naked until a few weeks after you’d met, and you definitely didn’t let him touch you for another two. He asked when he was going to get to put his dick inside you and he had that trademark grin. That little one, the one that only showed a sliver of his teeth, like a cat or something and you admit it was incredibly appealing. Maybe it’s because you’ve always liked cats. Or maybe it’s because Noiz was your fucking soul mate so you were going to like his smile whether it was sexy or cute or ugly as hell.

You thought it was leading up to something hot. You thought the first time you fucked it was going to be full of fireworks and neediness and some sort of desperate longing for someone not only sexually desirable but also a person who knew you better than almost anyone else. You and Noiz had gotten to talking about more serious things during your bouts of self-induced blue balls and you were excited to fuck someone who you really, really cared about. You were excited to be fucked by someone who really, really cared about you.

If you had only known that there was a time limit.

Your number one worry since day one has been that Noiz went to Virus and Trip because he was disappointed with you. You worry that you weren’t enough for him and you know it couldn’t possibly just be that he wanted to fuck someone but maybe it was. Maybe if you had just slept with him, everything would be okay. But you were going to. You’d had a date for that next day and Noiz had been texting you about it for a week. You thought he was happy. You thought he was finally happy.

You thought you were finally happy.

Maybe you’d done something wrong. Maybe you were actually consistently hurting him the whole time. Maybe he was going to Virus and Trip because he was trying to feel better from being with you. You can’t figure out what you did wrong. You know, during your brief times of clarity, that it wasn’t that. It couldn’t have been that. This is just another case of crippling insecurity and you’re driving yourself crazy with blame. But you were the one closest to him. You should have known. You should have been able to tell. You were the only one who could have.

Guilt. Massive amounts of guilt and – something more than guilt. Something a little bit different. Blame, you think it is. It’s all your fault and you know it. You can only blame yourself.

You know Aoba feels the same. Aoba thinks that because he never knew Virus and Trip were capable of such terror, he didn’t adequately protect Noiz. You know Aoba considers Noiz a little brother so you understand why he gets upset with himself but you always remind him that it wasn’t his fault. You don’t tell him that it’s because you know it was yours, but you assume it’s implied. It’s all your fault so he doesn’t need to blame himself.

Koujaku also feels some sort of guilt but you don’t know what for. It’s certainly not for Noiz’s current state and if he ever expressed any kind of remorse or regret for Noiz’s state, you’ve yet to fucking see it. You’re so livid with Koujaku right now you can hardly think about him without chucking your Coil across the room. So you don’t. You don’t think about Koujaku and you don’t think about Aoba and you don’t think about how this is all your fault. You look back down at your Coil instead, at the picture Noiz took of you, your hand wrapped around his dick just as you’re about to start licking the head with the tip of your tongue.

Just the tip… you’re going to tease him.

You sigh loudly. Noiz was really into taking pictures of you. Probably because you had made him hold out for so long that he wanted photographic evidence that it happened in the first place. He told you he wanted to be able to prove to himself that he didn’t make it up. That you finally got on your knees and sucked him off and you were so turned on by how filthy he could be – by how filthy he wanted to be with you – that you let him take the pictures without even demanding that he not show anyone.

You said it afterwards (“If anyone on this island tells me that they’ve seen a picture of me sucking your dick then you better hope I never get near it again because I’ll cut it off”), but he just grinned at you.

That little grin again. The one that makes you melt.

You sink down in your sheets. You’re not home often but Aoba made you sleep in your own bed tonight. You reach down into your jeans and start to grope yourself, flicking through the pictures on your Coil.

There’s a whole folder of Noiz jacking off that he sent to you one night. He’s in varying states of undress. You remember when you told him you were yawning and to call you if there was a buttplug involved.

He called two seconds later and let you listen as he opened and stretched himself, trying to take it all in. You thought he was exaggerating how big it was. He sent you a few pictures afterwards.

He wasn’t.

You can’t jerk off anymore without crying immediately afterwards. Probably because you feel so terrible for still jerking off to the thought of Noiz, and the second you’re done you curse yourself for not having more self-control. Stop masturbating to the boy who’s lying catatonic in your best friend’s home. Stop masturbating to the boy who was just kidnapped and tortured for a year. Stop using this boy for your own sick, sexual fantasies. You drink yourself to sleep that night and can’t come over right away the next morning. In fact, it takes you all of the following day to lessen your hangover enough to head back over to Koujaku’s.

Aoba says he regrets sending you home alone now that he realizes all you were going to do was drink yourself silly. You glare at him. He has so little faith in you.

It’s almost Noiz’s bedtime by the time you take your usual place by his side on the couch. Koujaku is locked up in his room; Aoba says he hasn’t come out all day other than to eat and you nod approvingly. He’s not allowed near Noiz anymore. Only you and Aoba make Noiz’s food. But Koujaku’s banishment is self-imposed; you’ve offered to take Noiz outside while he sits in the living room and he doesn’t take you up on it. You don’t really care. He wanted to kill Noiz. You want to kill him. Staying away from you is as much for his own safety as it is for Noiz’s.

You sigh deeply and look at the TV. Same old, same old: Noiz is watching some infomercial again and you assume he has been for hours, now. You don’t know why he’s unable to change the channel but you don’t force it. All you want is to sit next to him, so you don’t care what’s on TV. Of course, your head is still ringing from the hangover and your body is still dehydrated as hell, so you kind of hope Noiz wants to go to bed early tonight. Usually you hate sitting on the blowup mattress on the floor of his room for hours, staring at the ceiling, not tired enough to fall asleep at eleven o’clock at night, but that sounds great right now. Some aspirin, a gallon of water, and a pillow. No sound whatsoever and a dark, cool room. A blanket. Noiz’s skin against yours.

You wince to yourself. You don’t get to sleep in Noiz’s bed with him anymore. You’re still embarrassed about the time you tried to get in the tub with him. You still remember climbing in, one leg raised and awkward when he looked you in the eye and started screaming. You were naked. Naked and terrifying. Why did you think that was a good idea? To take off all your clothes and try to get close to Noiz? After what he’d been through? You don’t remember what was running through your head; if it was born out of some perverse, sexual desire or an emotional intimacy that you aren’t ready to leave behind. Either way, it terrified Noiz and you’re still humiliated by it.

“I’m going to hold your hand,” you say. It’s become rote. You say it every night. I’m going to hold your hand, then you hold his hand, then he does nothing. His fingers don’t wrap around yours and he doesn’t answer and he doesn’t seem interested at all. He used to curl into you in embarrassment; now he just sits there and stares at the TV.

Unblinking. Unflinching. Unremarkable.

Still. There’s a part of you that always hopes he’ll finally respond to you.

You cover his hand with your own and hold on tight.

He doesn’t react.

You watch TV with him for almost an hour. They’re really pushing an apple peeler and you’re so fucked up right now that you’re considering calling in and ordering. You really should be eating more fruit. Fiber. You should really cut out all the alcohol, too. You hate Aoba but he’s right. It’s not good for you and you’re getting older and less active, so it’s probably going to start to show soon. You don’t want to be thirty years old with a beer gut. Maybe you should stick to shots and hard liquor. Get drunk quicker and with less alcohol. And introduce some roughage to your diet. Noodles and eggs aren’t the only food groups, you remind yourself. You do tend to forget that. Because who needs anything but noodles and eggs?

“Where were you?”

You blink.

Was that – ?

You turn to Noiz, your eyes wide and confused.

“Wh – what?”

He doesn’t repeat his question. He simply blinks and looks to the side, as if he’s already bored with you. It’s the first time he’s spoken to you in weeks. You sit up straight and stare at him with wide eyes, trying to understand what just happened. He just spoke to you. He asked you a question. You keep his hand in yours and try to think of how to answer. No time to freak out now, you have to hold his attention.

“You – uh…” You pause. “I was at my place. Aoba made me spend the night in a real bed last night.”

There’s a long silence. You worry that that’s the end of it, but then he blinks again, his head turning to you slightly.

“Then why were you gone all day?”

He’s calling you out. He knows you’re hungover and you don’t really know how to respond. You’re – sort of annoyed, just like you were with Aoba. But you’re also relieved and ecstatic and shocked and anxious and your heart is racing and your hair is standing up on the back of your neck... Noiz just spoke to you. You’re the one person he still hasn’t really spoken to. You look into the dining room but Aoba is preoccupied by something on his Coil. You don’t want to interrupt the action to get his attention, so you let him be for the moment. Then you clear your throat and squeeze Noiz’s hand. You know he can’t feel it, but you do it anyway.

“Just say it – you know I’m hungover and you’re pissed that I got drunk last night.”

That’s what you would have said to him a year and a half ago. You turn to stare at his face harshly, and that’s when you see it – the corner of his lips tug upwards for just one second.

He smiled.

“Lush.”

You grin back.

“Oh yeah?” you say, feigning annoyance. “I thought you liked that I was a lush. You love when I get drunk and flirt with you.”

His fingers jolt in yours. Just a quick, sudden jerk of the tips and your heart skips a beat.

“But you weren’t here to flirt with me.”

“Well, I’m here now.”

He closes his eyes and tilts his head back. That usually means he’s ready for bed and your heart drops through the floor. You’re not ready for your first conversation with Noiz to be over. What if it never happens again? Did you take it too far? Is he too scared now? Is he remembering when you tried to get in the tub with him? Should you have not sounded so eager? Fuck, you sounded too eager. You shouldn’t have made him uncomfortable by trying to hit on him. Well, I’m here now, what kind of idiot are you?

His fingers close around yours and he squeezes so hard that you almost jerk your hand away.

He’s trying to hold your hand. Oh God, he’s holding your hand. After all this time, Noiz is holding your hand.

He’s finally aware that you exist.

“Do you want me to take you to bed?” you whisper to him. You want an answer. A real, honest to God, verbal answer. You’ll do anything he wants, as long as he keeps talking to you.

He takes a deep breath and at first you think he’s going to scream, but then he mumbles out a labored sentence:

“I’ve been trying to get you to take me to bed for years.”

His lips tic again and you almost swallow your tongue.

Aoba has no idea what just happened as he watches you drag Noiz toward the bathroom, his arm around your shoulders as usual. You help him hobble to the tub and fill it up all the way, making sure it’s warm enough to soothe his muscles, even if he can’t feel any ache in them.

“I’ve been waiting for you to talk to me for months,” you tell him honestly as you run a washcloth over his neck. He doesn’t answer you, and you didn’t really expect him to. You just wanted him to know. “I’ll keep waiting. I’ll wait as long as I need to so take your time. I’ll be here, whenever you want to – do anything again.”

You didn’t mean to imply sex, but you think that’s how he took it because he actually gives you a small laugh. It’s sort of a half-grunt, half-chuckle, like laughing too fully is difficult for him right now, but you feel so warm that you’d swear you were the one in the hot bath.

You rest your head on the side of the tub and before you know it, two hours have passed and you’ve both fallen asleep. Noiz’s skin is wrinkled and soft when you finally get him into bed and sit at the foot, staring up at him and wondering how just looking into his eyes seems to quell your headache.

“Goodnight, Noiz.”

You slide down onto the floor and crawl over to the air mattress. You’re too tired and too wrecked to change into your pajamas so you pull the blanket over your leather pants and spread out to feel the cool of the plastic against your skin. You close your eyes and start to doze off immediately, happier than you have been while falling asleep in a long time.

“Wilhelm.”

You’re actually so close to losing consciousness that you think it’s part of your dream at first.

Then you realize that Noiz just said something and you shoot up so straight and so fast that your head stings and you have to grab your temple immediately.

“What? What did you say?”

As usual, there’s a long pause. You rub your fingertips against your skull and push in on your eyelid, close to vomiting from the pain.

“Goodnight, Wilhelm.”

Goodnight, Wilhelm? Your name isn’t Wilhelm. Has he got you confused with someone? But that isn’t something Noiz does; that’s not something Noiz has ever done. He’s never had amnesia, he’s just refused to respond. It sounds like he’s talking to you, but maybe he’s not.

Ah. He’s speaking for you –

You raise your eyebrows and open your mouth in shock. The headache is forgotten and you realize that he’s telling you his name.

“I, ah –” Don’t act stupid and lose his trust. God. Wilhelm? What a stupid name. No wonder he never told you it. “Goodnight… Wilhelm.”

Noiz pulls the covers over his shoulder and turns onto his side to face the wall. That means the conversation is over and he’s done talking. But it’s alright, because he’s just told you more in two words than he has in an entire year.

Because he hasn’t simply told you his name: he’s also told you that he trusts you still. He said he never wanted to tell you his name before because he didn’t want you to make fun of him, but you could tell he didn’t mean that. He didn’t think you’d make fun of him – or maybe he did, but that wasn’t what he cared about. He did say he didn’t want you to tell Koujaku, and you probably would have a year and a half ago, but now you’re going to keep it to yourself.

What he was scared of was that you’d make the connection. He didn’t want you to be able to connect Wilhelm to who he was before he came to the island. He’d told you about his past. He’d told you about his dad and his mom and his brother and he didn’t want you to know who he was back then. He’d changed by the time he got to Midorijima and he didn’t want you to know that version of him – the version named Wilhelm, apparently. He just wanted to be Noiz to you. He wanted to be someone free of those chains, though you don’t think he ever really was. He was always kind of Wilhelm, and he always kind of will be.

  
And now he’ll always kind of be Noiz, no matter what. He’s been through too much as Noiz to ever really forget.

You wonder how different things would be if you’d ever had a nickname. If you’d ever been anyone but Mizuki. If you’d ever done Rhyme and had a Rhyme name. You don’t know what Noiz’s was, but you wonder if he ever connected to it like he did Wilhelm and Noiz.

In fact, now that you think about it, you start to wonder where Noiz came from.

You slink back down onto the air mattress and hug the pillow under your cheek.

There has never been a doubt in your mind that Noiz could get better. You truly believe that he’ll be able to function on his own again. And other than the fact that it’s most likely your fault that he has to get better in the first place, you’re positive that you’re the person who should be by his side, helping him do it.

 

You wake up to screams the next morning and it takes you a few seconds to realize that they’re your own.

But they’re back: Virus and Trip are back and they’re taking Noiz again and you’re lying right there but you can’t move to stop them. So of course you scream. You have to scream. You dream about them a lot – you dreamt about them a lot before you knew they had anything to do with Noiz, because they had everything to do with you. That’s something you and Noiz have in common: you have both been kidnapped by Morphine.

They wanted a little more substance out of you, of course. You think you were better off for that. Just one more reason for you to feel guilty.

You know it’s just a dream but you can’t shake it. You know you’re supposed to close your eyes until the paralysis passes but you can’t. If it’s not paralysis – if Virus and Trip are really here, if they’re really standing over Noiz’s bed, if they’re really reaching out slowly to grab him and wrap him off and carry him away again – then you need to see it. You need to watch them do it. It’s the most painful thing you’ve ever seen but you have to witness it, so you can know. So you can know what happened with complete certainty.

They took him. They made him leave. They didn’t give him a choice.

He didn’t go to them. He wasn’t so upset with you that he went to them willingly. They kidnapped him by force, non-consensually. That’s what happened. That’s what had to have happened.

Of course, by the time you’re fully aware of yourself, you’ve been sitting straight up on your mattress screaming at the top of your lungs for a full minute.

It’s Aoba who actually shakes you to consciousness. You were halfway there, but it’s Aoba’s voice that brings you around fully, and it’s a familiar, head-splitting voice. It’s the one he used when he Scrapped you – and you don’t realize what you’re doing until Aoba’s already bruised.

You punch him. You swing your arm around hard and punch him. Right in the mouth.

You told him to stop using Scrap. You told him to stop using it on Noiz. No one else knew what he was doing to calm him down, but you did. You recognize the voice. The face. The atmosphere. Every time he brought Noiz back from the precipice, he was almost Scrapping him. And you’d thrown him against a wall the last time, threatened his life if he did it again, and he swore he didn’t mean to do it, not even the first time. You didn’t believe him then, but you didn’t mean to punch him now, either.

“I’m sorry!” you cry, flinging your blanket off your body and twisting up onto your hands and knees to face him. He’s groaning and lifting a hand to his face to wipe away blood from his lips but he seems more annoyed than anything else. A shadow casts into the room and you look up to see Koujaku standing in the doorway, eyes wide and mouth open.

“What the hell happened here?” he asks softly. You shake your head and try to lift yourself up onto your feet. You’re so weak though, almost as if you’re still hungover, but you know it’s mostly from the nightmare. You’re always weak after those. You’ve never dreamt about the shadowy figures taking someone else though, only yourself –

You immediately whirl your head around to check on Noiz.

He’s staring at you, his eyes just as wide as Koujaku’s. He has the blanket pulled up around his head like a child and your heart sinks.

He’s scared of you. You just terrified him. Again.

“I’m sorry,” you say again, but you’re not sure to whom. To everyone, really. “I’m so – I’m sorry. I – I was having a night terror.”

“I know you were,” Aoba groans. “That’s why I was trying to wake you up.”

“I know, but I didn’t know it was you.”

“I know,” he shakes his head dismissively. “I know you didn’t.”

“They were here,” you say. You want them to believe you. You want Noiz to believe you. “They – they were taking him away. They were taking Noiz away again and I couldn’t move and I couldn’t stop them.”

Koujaku’s eyes dart to Noiz and then back to you. He shakes his head but you don’t quite get the message.

“I just – I didn’t want them to take him but I just had to know that he didn’t just go voluntarily.”

“Mizuki.”

Koujaku’s voice is soft but serious and he glides his fingers against his throat. Cut it out. Cut it out, he’s saying. Stop talking. Stop doing what you’re doing.

All you can do is grab your own throat to feel the bandages. Yeah, they’re still there. There are still bandages around your marred skin and you look over at Noiz. There are tears streaming down his cheeks and you reach your hand out to him.

He recoils in fear and you feel tears spring to your own eyes.

“No, I was trying to protect you!”

“I think we should go,” Koujaku says, his voice still as quiet as ever, and you don’t think you’ve ever heard Koujaku sound that gentle. He rushes toward you and suddenly you’re angry. “Aoba, stay with Noiz. Mizuki and I are going to go make breakfast.”

“I’m not going to go make breakfast with you!” you shout, trying to stand and balance on your feet, but all you can do is stumble. Koujaku grabs you the way you grab Noiz to steady him and you try to throw another punch, but he dodges. To be honest, you’re a little grateful because your knuckles are already fucked from punching Aoba. They need to be wrapped, but you don’t want to admit it. You want Koujaku to leave you the fuck alone. You want to stay with Noiz. He told you his name last night. He told you who he was before he knew you and you just want to stay with Noiz –

“We’ll all have breakfast together,” Koujaku tries to satiate you as he grabs the collar of your shirt and pulls you off the mattress. “Come on. Let’s go cook something for all four of us to enjoy.” Your shirt starts to slide off your body from Koujaku’s strength, but he manages to get a hold of your shoulder too and you’re simply too weak to resist. You let him push you out of the room and into a chair at the kitchen table.

You haven’t really spoken to Koujaku in weeks. You rub your eye with the heel of your hand and grimace at the table.

You ruined everything.

Everything is your fault.

“Are you okay?” Koujaku asks you a few seconds later, putting a glass of water down in front of you. You look at the water and then you glare at him. Three weeks ago, he said it might be more merciful to kill Noiz. You wanted to destroy him with your bare hands.

You knock the glass of water off the kitchen table with a quick swipe of your hand. He winces and sighs but doesn’t seem to get angry. You seethe at him.

“Did you think it would be best to kill me, too?”

His eyes turn to you and he slowly cocks his head to the side. He watches you earnestly, as if he’s somewhat offended.

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“I mean, if you want to kill Noiz, then you probably wanted to kill me too, huh?”

“I never wanted to kill Noiz,” he says angrily. “Everything I said that day came out wrong!”

“How could it come out wrong? You were pretty clear in what you meant!”

“Obviously I wasn’t, if you still think I meant I wanted to kill Noiz!”

“Aw, poor Koujaku,” you fume, pulling down on your bottom lip with your finger. “Boo hoo, you don’t get to fuck anyone anymore!”

“What the hell does that have to do with any of this?” he asks. “Just because the guy you want to fuck can’t have sex with you anymore doesn’t mean that’s all I ever think about.”

You reach out to strike him across the face but he manages to block you. He always knows exactly how you’re going to hit him. He knows you too well. You used to get emotional about that; now you’re simply full of regret.

“Just because I finally met someone I want to fuck monogamously and you still can’t figure out how to talk to someone after sex doesn’t mean you have the right to talk shit on us!”

“I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

By now you’re halfway standing, leaning over the table to try to spit in his face as you speak. You don’t know what’s come over you. You never really know what’s come over you anymore. You just want to hurt Koujaku and then yourself.

“I finally found someone to love and you’re pissed because you haven’t! You’re especially pissed because you didn’t like him in the first place!”

“He was an annoying little kid in the first place, that doesn’t mean I hated him then and I certainly don’t hate him now and above all, I never suggested that we actually kill him.”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore or I might do something I regret,” you say finally, pushing the chair out from behind you and heading into the living room. You beeline straight for the porch door and let yourself out.

You sit outside for the better part of the morning. All you can think about is Noiz’s face, terrified and staring at you, listening to you as you replayed the single most horrifying experience of his entire life back to him. You close your eyes in humiliation and shame. You can’t seem to do anything but hurt Noiz.

No wonder he went to Virus and Trip.

This really is all your fault.

 

Aoba tells you that you should do something for yourself and you begrudgingly admit that he’s right. Aoba’s a good friend.

You go shopping. You know it seems like an insignificant thing, but you like new clothes. You like new leather, particularly, and you figure you’re at the right stage in your life to try something you always wanted to, because you can blame the potential fashion faux pas on your terrible headspace right now. “Hey, the guy I was dating was kidnapped for a year and now I’m taking care of him. If I want a leather choker, I can get a leather choker.”

The fact that it covers up the Morphine scars on your throat is simply a fringe benefit.

Aoba’s mouth drops open when he sees it and you prepare yourself for an onslaught of insults, but he quickly closes it and looks back at the TV. In fact, you’re fairly sure he looks irritated, rather than amused. You don’t really understand why he won’t answer you until it dawns on you that he’s blushing. There’s no way you can resist; you sit right next to him and cover him in an awkward hug, crooning into his ear about whether you look sexy like this or not. He shoves you off and you keep laughing.

That would be the end of it, if Noiz hadn’t walked into the room just then.

Aoba raises his eyebrows at him and nods, so you look over and do the same.

“Hey, Noiz. Do you li – ”

He makes a sound that you can only describe as a whimper mixed with a sob and even Aoba is terrified.

“What’s wrong – ”

Noiz rushes at you and you brace yourself between Aoba and the couch. Aoba actually slides to his knees to the floor and ducks for cover. Aoba is useless.

“Hey!”

You scream at Noiz before he has his hands around your throat and tackles you to the couch. Everything is blurry for a moment and you don’t know if it’s because you have tears in your eyes so immediately or because you aren’t really here right now. There are fingernails at your throat and all you can do is attack. There is no defensive mode when it comes to this; you see Virus and Trip and the person on top of you doesn’t exist. You hear your own scream as if it’s coming from someone else: loud and ripping through the room as you throw an elbow. The scream from the person on top of you is different: it’s scared and upset while you’re violent and offensive.

It takes you a few seconds to realize the third scream is coming from Aoba and not Virus or Trip. That brings you back to reality enough to remember that it’s Noiz on top of you, not a Morphine member or a yakuza creep. You have your hands around Noiz’s neck and he has his around yours. Aoba is trying to tear you both apart, but you fight for a few seconds longer until you realize you have to stop and you lie slack. Aoba manages to wedge his body between you both and he pulls you off the couch.

Noiz topples down on top of you.

“I’m just trying to get it off!”

“Noiz, stop it! Stop! Stop, Noiz!” Aoba is trying to reason with him, but you know there’s no point. You crawl away from both of them on your stomach, like you’re trying to escape a war zone. Noiz is screaming and you’re crying and Aoba is doing his best to contain the situation. Koujaku shows up at some point but it’s not until Noiz is sobbing at them that he’s trying to save you that any of you pause and listen to him.

“What do you mean, ‘save him?’” Aoba asks. Noiz points wildly at your neck.

“The collar!” he shouts. “It means he belongs to them! They’ll tie him up and keep him on the bed! I don’t want him to be humiliated!”

“Take the thing off,” Koujaku says immediately but you shake your head.

“I’m not taking this off,” you say. Koujaku disappears and you look back at Noiz. You’re on your back, one arm propping you up, and Aoba is restraining Noiz in some sort of awkward, makeshift hold.

“What do you mean, humiliated?” you ask. You don’t know why you ask, but the word stirs something inside of you.

“You know!” he whispers loudly through his teeth, as if he’s trying to keep someone from hearing him. “Trip likes to keep you on his bed all day. But if you mess up the sheets… and you will mess up the sheets…”

You and Aoba stare at each other in horror.

“He punishes you if you make a mess but the leash doesn’t reach the bathroom.”

You turn onto your stomach and dry heave. Koujaku shows up just then with bandages and yanks you out of the room.

Things start to settle down then and Koujaku sits you down on the closed toilet lid in the bathroom to take off the leather choker and reapply fresh bandages. Neither of you say a single word but he looks soft and sad – like he’s sad for you, and that pisses you off. He has no right to be so good to you, not when you’re so mad at him.

“I’ll go talk to Aoba and see if Noiz is okay. Maybe he should see you without the collar on.”

“Choker.”

“What?”

“It isn’t a collar. It’s just a necklace.”

Koujaku nods.

“Sorry. Maybe he’d just feel better if he knew you weren’t still wearing it.”

He leaves the room before you can answer. You sit on the toilet lid and stare at the floor, realizing suddenly that your lip is throbbing. You stand up and check the mirror – it’s starting to swell. You swear to yourself under your breath and grab the hand towel and run cold water over it. You ball it up and lift it to your lip. This is rote. You know how to take care of injuries. You’ve just never taken care of an injury from Noiz before.

He shows up in the doorway a few seconds later.

You turn to him and notice Aoba and Koujaku just a few feet behind him. He wanders sheepishly into the room and you drop the towel from your mouth. He winces at your lip and looks away.

“Did I do that to you?”

“No,” you lie immediately. “You didn’t do anything to me.”

His eyes flicker back and roam over your neck. The entire room is tense as you wait for him to either freak out again or not. It strikes you as depressing that the best scenario here is one in which nothing happens. Nothing good can happen, so nothing happening at all is your best bet.

“I thought they were here.”

Your nostrils flare as you nod at him.

That’s your fault. It’s because you rambled like an idiot this morning. You put him back in a bad place and when he attacked you, he did it to help. He thought he was helping you even though all you can do is hurt him.

“They’re not.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“No,” you shake your head. “Don’t be sorry. I put the idea in your head this morning. I’m sorry.”

“No,” he mimics, also shaking his head. “Don’t be sorry.” He puts his hand in yours suddenly and your heart leaps into your throat. “We’re both still broken.”

You cry.

You cry because he looks so sad and small and scared. You cry because he looks so gorgeous and he always has. You cry because Aoba and Koujaku can hear everything and you never wanted them to. You cry because you never wanted anyone to know how fucked up you still are and how not over any of this you’ve been since day one. You cry because the second things were getting better for you, Virus and Trip came for Noiz. You cry because Virus and Trip have it out for you. You cry because they couldn’t break you physically, so they went after the guy you loved instead, to try to break you mentally.

You cry because he’s right.

You’re both still broken and you’re starting to realize that neither one of you can be fixed.


	8. Lucidity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Imminent Rally Acceptance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I completely forgot about updating this x-x sorry about that

You’ve been crying a lot lately.

  
You’re sitting on the air mattress in Noiz’s room, eyes red and itchy, as you can’t stop rubbing them. Your nose is both stuffed up and running at the same time somehow, you don’t know how you managed that. You’re wearing only a tank top and mesh shorts, and you really notice how much skinnier your legs have gotten. They used to be big and muscular and strong – not as strong as Aoba’s, but still pretty agile – but now they look like a chicken’s, and you lift your tank top up for just a moment to check… okay, at least your six pack is still there. For now.

  
You’ve been reduced to this, really. First a coma and then the rehabilitation. After that, it still took months to get back into the kind of shape to fight, and even now, no one will really fight with you. Koujaku is the only one who will get even half as rough as he used to, and it’s frustrating. You’re back to normal – well, as normal as you can be after something like that. But physically, you’re fine. You’re not like Noiz. Mentally – emotionally – you might not be one hundred percent, but no one has to know about that. Physically, you’re up to snuff. Noiz can’t even feed himself. You can use the punching bag again. You’re not like Noiz.

You breathe in heavily, the air punctured by staccato, haunting sobs. You’re not exactly bawling anymore, but the tears are still welling up now and then and your breathing is still in the process of returning to normal. These episodes just happen, for no rhyme or reason. No Rhyme or Rib. You almost start to cry again over how bad that pun is. Anything can make you cry lately.

You think it’s because now, more than anything, you’re confused. At first, you were simply depressed. Miserable. Everything was hopeless and you were helpless and nothing was ever going to turn out okay and you knew it. At least it was a concrete concept and you could accept it. You could plan the rest of your life accordingly. Everything was terrible and that was a constant. It’s easy to deal with constants.

It’s not so easy to deal with the highs and lows. The constant now is up, then down, then even lower, then so high that you might faint from happiness… then so, so low that you might just kill yourself to get it over with. Noiz is better – then he’s not better – then he’s actually laughing – then he’s screaming and trying to hide behind Aoba’s back for the better part of an hour and can’t stop crying for two days straight. Then he kisses you on the forehead and you see God. You just wish you could see him for long enough to beg him to fix this. Noiz is still gorgeous, and you still can’t stop thinking about him that way. You still remember the few times you hooked up in such great detail that you can’t keep yourself from touching yourself and you always end up in tears afterwards.

You always end up in tears anyway, so why not go ahead and have the orgasm?

It’s so automatic, too: come, then cry. You start the sobbing just at the tail end of the orgasm. It’s been happening the past couple of weeks now. Of course, you cry otherwise, too. But it seems guaranteed after jacking off now, which is why you do your best not to think of Noiz, but it’s too hard. You want him too bad. You never moved on. Even when you said you had, even when you pretended you were angry but didn’t care, even when you went silent on the subject for nine months, you weren’t over him. You weren’t over it. Noiz was so intimate with you – emotionally, more than physically, even – and you can’t let that go. You don’t get that intimate with just anybody, and Noiz isn’t just anybody. He’s your soul mate.

You don’t know if you felt that way the night before your first date. It’s possible that the sheer morbidity and powerlessness of the situation has made you feel stronger than you would have. Maybe you wouldn’t be so in love with Noiz at this point if everything were normal. Maybe you would have broken up and gotten over him and moved on to someone new by now. But as it is, you’re a mess. Every day and every night, you’re a mess and it’s all because of Noiz.

The air mattress deflates every morning. You deflate every night. You’ve stopped worrying about pumping it back up. You just sleep on the hard floor at this point. Aoba has to put more air in it when you’re not looking. You have to touch yourself when’s not. You’ve never done it in the room with Noiz before, at least. You haven’t sunk that low. You haven’t hit the floor like the mattress has quite yet.

But it’s coming.

(You’ll probably cry after that comes, too.)

You stretch your legs out and dig the heel of your hand into your eyes again. Your hairy, skinny legs; your weak little arms… you let yourself become this way. It’s stupid to cry over it when you know you could fix it, you just refuse. You hate yourself for not fixing your body, when Noiz doesn’t have that luxury himself. You are so selfish and ungrateful for what you have. All you can do is sit here in the dark and cry about everything you’ve lost when everyone else has lost far more than you. 

You put people in the hospital just because you got scared they were going to leave. People – humans, with free will and the consciousness to make their own choices. They left you. They left you and Rib and Dry Juice and you punished other people for that. You punished the people who were good to you. The ones who stayed. They’re the ones who got punished. You’d say you wish you could punish yourself for all of it, but that might turn you on and the last thing you need right now is to imagine Noiz punishing you. You don’t have any tears left to cry.

That’s when the door creaks open and you panic. It’s too late. Whoever walks in is going to see you were crying. Even if you aren’t anymore, the index of your latest breakdown still exists. You have to sniff snot back into your nose as they enter and…

It’s Noiz. You’re not sure why he was the last person you were expecting, but you’re surprised. Happy. Afraid. Surprised. He’s walked a bit more on his own lately, but not as much as you’d like. This is good, though. You like this.

“Hey…”

You offer him a weak greeting. Your voice is still shaky and it’s so obvious that you could die. This is so humiliating. Noiz is seeing you cry when you’re supposed to be the strong one for him.

You look down at you blanket and then cover up your tiny legs. Everything about you is so embarrassing.

“I heard you crying.”

A sob escapes your mouth immediately. God, this is awful.

You shake your head and try to find some words.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be loud.”

For some reason, the tears come back. You manage to keep yourself from crying aloud again, but the last few words of your statement trail upward as you stifle the sobbing. Noiz doesn’t reply. He stands in the doorway for a few moments before slowly making his way over to the air mattress.

You look up at him in shock as he takes step after step after step. His toes drag along the floor with every tread, but eventually he’s sitting down on the floppy mattress right in front of you and you’re about to cry out of sheer pleasure. He looks you in the eye and then he puts his hand to your face. Your breathing starts to pick up due to shock more than anything else. 

“Don’t be sorry.”

You cry.

You push your face into his hand and grip it with your own. You press it into your skin. You just want to feel him, even if he can’t do the same.

“I’m so sorry.”

He winces.

You just want him to know everything. You wish you could tell him. You wish he could know that you still think about him like that. That you still fantasize about him and that just imagining him naked is practically a violation of his body and you’re so, so, so sorry.

Maybe it’s subconscious, because sex just crossed your mind. Maybe your eyes were just naturally roaming that part of the room. Or maybe it’s because you’re a filthy pervert.

You notice there’s a bulge in Noiz’s sweatpants and you can’t tear your eyes from it.

Is he –?

You grit your teeth. You’re about to say something to him when – 

Noiz tackles you, ends up in your lap as his hands grab either side of your face and his lips press against yours. You try to breath through the haphazard kiss, mostly because you start to cry again, but you can’t. He’s smashed his face against yours and forces your head into his, like a child who’s refusing to give up what he wants. It’s like he wants you, almost as badly as you want him. But he doesn’t seem to feel quite so guilty for it.

“Mh—mff!” You try to pull away. You already know you shouldn’t be doing this, no matter how bad he wants it.

“Don’t,” he says, his voice sad and soft, rather than sexy or even menacing. You shake your head. “Don’t pull away.”

“No—”

“Do you want to kiss me, Mizuki?”

You’re crying. There are tears streaming down your cheeks, actively and violently. You want to kiss him so badly that you actually nod – and then you kiss him back.

“I’m sorry,” you mumble against him, the subsequent kisses sloppy and full of teeth. Noiz has forgotten how to kiss – but then you remember that he was never all that good at it. You thought that was strange. For all the sex that Noiz had, he wasn’t good at kissing?

You don’t care if he’s good or bad right now though. All you want is to touch him.

But you don’t.

You can’t bring yourself to stop the kissing, but you don’t dare move another muscle. Your legs are wrapped precariously around Noiz’s waist, while your hands are now on either side of your own body, gripping the blanket around you tightly. Your eyes flutter open and closed, your lips move against Noiz’s, but the rest of you is stone still. The slightest movement might trigger something in Noiz and somewhere, deep in the back of your brain, you know you shouldn’t be doing this, but the part of you that’s making your own dick grow in your shorts can’t be fucked to accept that right now.

Noiz, however, can’t seem to keep still.

His breathing starts to pick up as he makes out with you with so much fervor that you worry he’ll drop right there from exhaustion. After a few seconds, you start to taste salt and you realize that your tears are mixing with your saliva. He’s been kissing you for so long and you’ve been crying so hard that they’ve fallen onto his lips.

He seems to taste them, too.

He pulls back finally, licking his lips free of your tears. You sniff, embarrassed at just how much of a mess you are. You let out another sob, too. He stares at you for a few seconds as he seems to savor the taste of your sadness. 

Then tears come to his eyes, faster than you’ve ever seen.

Then he screams.

“I’m sorry!”

You brace yourself for the impending breakdown, but it doesn’t come. Not like usual, at least. You’re expecting him to run – to hide from you, under the blanket or under the bed or something. But he doesn’t do that. He does the opposite.

He grips your tank top and pulls himself closer to you. He implodes against your chest, resting his cheek on you and wrapping his arms around your shoulders.

“I didn’t mean to make you cry!”

“Noiz – ”

“I don’t ever want to do to you what they did to me!”

You envelop him with your arms in turn, all your previous nerves and anxiety about crying completely disappearing. When you speak, you’re sobbing openly. Your words are almost indiscernible. You don’t care.

“What did they do to you?”

“The…”

He’s trying to speak but you’re both too wrecked to do anything but wait for him to get the words out. You don’t know how long it takes. Time doesn’t exist right now.

“The tears… the salt… the taste… I’m sorry…”

You shake your head against him.

“For what?”

“They… my own…”

You pull him away from your chest and toward your shoulders. You hug him. You hug him as tight as you can, your legs still around his waist and you put your face in his hair, breathing him in.

“Your own what?”

“My… tears…”

You wish it would click for you, but you need more. You don’t want more, but you have to understand. Your snot drips into his hair. You love him so much.

“Your tears what?”

“When… they liked it when I cried… I could taste them, too…”

Your heart gets caught in your throat and for a moment you’re choking too hard to cry. They made him cry and he tasted his own tears. Taste is the one thing he can do, and they made him taste his own tears. You let him taste your neck and waist and hips; they made him taste himself. You pull on his hair tight in an effort to hold him closer and take comfort in knowing that he can’t feel that pain.

“I’m sorry,” you tell him softly, your head starting to pound. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Noiz, I’m so sorry –”

He interrupts you to jerk away violently, and then grabs your shoulders. He forces you down onto the air mattress so suddenly that you lose your breath. Your eyes go wide and you gasp as he pins you down.

“I want to be with you!” he shouts. You can’t move. “I want to be with you again! But I don’t want to do to you what they did to me.”

“Why would you have – ”

“Even after all of it! I still! Want! To! Fuck! You!”

You start to really panic. Your heart starts to race and you can’t get a full breath.

“I want to have sex with you. But I don’t want you to fuck me, I want to fuck you! I want to fuck you, Mizuki!”

He uses your name. He knows exactly what he’s saying, and he means it.

“I don’t want anyone to fuck me ever again...But I want to hold you down and tie you up and make sure you feel my dick inside you -But I don’t want to be like them! I don’t want to hurt you! I’m sorry, Mizuki!”

“Noiz, calm down!”

“How can I calm down when I’m always imagining what it’s like to fuck you?!” He shouts so loud that you’re positive Koujaku and Aoba can hear him. “How can I calm down when I have dreams of doing to you what they did to me?!”

You swallow hard.

Virus and Trip did stuff to you themselves, too. Not the same kind of “stuff,” but… still bad. You simply can’t remember it as well as Noiz can.

That’s when you realize that you don’t know what Noiz’s dreams about you would entail.

You don’t know everything they did to him. 

You lick your lips.

“Noiz…”

“Mizuki… Mizuki…”

You don’t want to ask it.

“What did they do to you?”

His eyes go wider than you feel like they should be able to. He stares at you like that for several seconds, and then…

“They put me on a leash. They kept me like that. They made sure I couldn’t escape. But then they wanted to break me until I didn’t even want to try. They wanted to hurt me so bad that I would break... And they knew! They knew I couldn’t feel the pain -they didn’t care! They did their best anyway.”

You immediately try to backpedal. You don’t think you can stand it.

“Stop, I don’t –”

“They made me eat until I threw up, and then they’d punish me for being a glutton. That’s why I’d ruin Trip’s sheets. I knew I’d get punished for it, but I couldn’t help it! They put me in a trunk.”

“Stop!”

  
“After three days of not eating though, you don’t really need to use the bathroom.”

“Noiz!”

  
“And my body!”

You don’t want to hear this, but you were the one who asked. You don’t want to know what they did, but you think you might have to know. The more pieces you hear… the more you can try to pick up and put back together.

  
“And that’s what I dream about most.”

You look at him suddenly and his grip on your shoulders weakens.

“What… do you dream about?”

He sits back silently, his eyes going wide again. His mouth is slightly open and he seems to look right through you.

“I dream about tying you up. Tying you to the bed. You don’t really want me to, though. You would, if I was someone else, maybe. I don’t know who. You tell me that, too. You say, ‘I don’t know about this, Noiz… I like it, but…’ You don’t want to be doing it with me. But I don’t listen. You like to drink, so I get you drunk. Did you know that you can get drunk faster by shoving the wine bottle up your ass? I show you how. I can show you. I don’t like to drink, but they liked to show me how. I can make you open your mouth by pinching your nose. You’re still tied to the bed, of course. Then they put the wine bottle in my mouth and made me chug until it was running all down my body. I hate being drunk. I don’t know how you do it. Then the next day… they showed me the other way. They used lube though, don’t worry, it won’t hurt. It’ll feel weird. Uncomfortable. And then you’ll feel even more drunk than I did last night.”

He’s incoherent and you’re fairly sure he’s starting to break with reality, but not a single part of you knows how to bring him back.

“Sometimes they bring in Herscha.”

You furrow your brows.

“Who’s Herscha?”

“The snake.”

You think you might vomit in your mouth a bit.

“…Snake?”

“He’s so good to his master. Virus is a good master. And Trip. The lion, you know. Welter. I remember. I remember their names. They’re German. Just like me. The lion, he holds you down. His front paws on your chest, the claws will hurt. They especially hurt you, in the dreams, you know? Because _you_ can actually feel the pain because you’re not a freak. Too bad, being a freak actually helped me in this case. Then the snake goes inside you. It’s so hot to watch you get fucked like that. I like the way you struggle.”

He pauses.

Then he starts to sob again.

“I’m sorry! I don’t want you to struggle! I don’t want to hurt you! Why do I like it so much when I dream about it?”

“Noiz, it’s okay,” you try to soothe him. He seems to have clicked back into reality. Your voice comes out smoother than you expect and you wish you could run your hands down his arms in comfort, but he has them pinned under his knees. “You can’t control your dreams, especially after a trauma. I’ve had the darkest dreams of my entire life after… them.”

His head whips to you in revelation.

“You know how evil they are.”

You nod.

“I do. I do know. And I had dreams like that, too.”

“You did?”

That’s when the door slams open.

“Hey!”

Noiz whirls around and you recognize Koujaku’s voice. You lay completely immobile as he rushes over and picks Noiz up from under his arms, ushering him away and out of the room. Aoba meets him at the doorway and takes him from him, whisking him down the hallway and into the bathroom. You hear the door close with a thud, and Koujaku’s footsteps return to the room. It all happened to quick. One second, Noiz is sitting on top of you, trying to fuck you, crying about how badly he’s broken, and the next… he’s gone. You’re so used to this by now. You’re used to losing Noiz in a matter of seconds. 

Koujaku shuffles into the bedroom. It’s still dark. Your head is still pounding. You’re staring at the ceiling.

“What were you thinking?”

Koujaku is incredulous. So are you.

You wouldn’t be able to explain it, so you don’t. Koujaku waits, seemingly for an answer, but you never give it, so he scoffs and leaves the room.

He probably thinks you came onto Noiz. You start to cry again.

 

Aoba is speaking in hushed tones a few hours later, and Noiz is having none of it.

“Stop being so annoying.”

You can’t hear how Aoba responds. You’re sitting at the dinner table, staring down at your food in shame. Koujaku is to your right, awkwardly fiddling with his chopsticks as you both wait for Aoba and Noiz to join the table.

“I’m – _fine!_ ” 

Noiz is getting increasingly frustrated. You hear Aoba shush him and then Noiz pushes him out of the way and huffs over to his seat at the table.

“You really are like an annoying older brother.”

Aoba’s face appears in the doorway. He’s annoyed but somewhat touched, you think. You suppose it is touching. At least Noiz regards him as a sibling he’ll never be rid of rather than an overprotective creep he wants to run away from.

Aoba joins you at the table as well, still pouting.

Koujaku leans over to Noiz’s plate and picks up his fork and knife, ready to cut his meat up for him. Noiz, however, smacks the knife out of his hand.

“Don’t touch my food.”

“I’m cutting it up for you.”

“I know how to use a knife.”

Confusion etches Koujaku’s face as Noiz snatches the knife up in his hand. You watch in wonder as he starts to cut his own food for the first time ever. What’s gotten into him? How is he suddenly so capable?

  
Your entire body feels dry – dehydrated from crying – and your mouth perpetually hangs open to breathe since you’re nasal passages are too stuffed up to let air pass through your nose. You stare at Noiz with heavy-lidded, sad eyes and he cuts his entire slab of meat up in ten seconds flat. You take a deep breath.

“You okay?”

The entire table looks up at you in alarm, Noiz included. He pauses, nods, and then stuffs the first piece of meat into his mouth. Your face remains unchanged. Sick. Dry. Sad.

Aoba’s face has softened in the time since he sat down. He’s more concerned than anything when he speaks:

“Noiz, where is this coming from?” he asks. “What… what happened? What made things better?”

Now Noiz stares at Aoba the way he just stared at you, the meat in his mouth bulging from his cheeks. He looks like a chipmunk. He refuses to swallow.

Then he turns to you.

You breathe in sharply, then cock your head slowly to the side.

“I love you,” you say. He turns to Koujaku and everyone else looks at you. It’s your own fucked up form of musical chairs.

“I can’t do it anymore.”

Noiz says it so quietly, that no one responds. Aoba looks at you in sadness, his eyebrows slanted and lips parted to try to think of something helpful to say. Koujaku’s face is just as sad, just as soft. He puts his hand out to let Noiz know he’s there. You know how Noiz feels. You know what it’s like to feel like you just can’t go on. You can’t continue feeling that way. Something snaps. Sometimes in a good way.

  
Noiz must have snapped in a good way, but it’s not all that easy. He went too fast. He thought he could have sex with you, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t ready for that yet. It’s okay though. He’s fine, you’re fine, and it’ll get easier.

  
You put your hand out to let him know you’re there, too.

 

He puts the knife in his hand to his opposite wrist and, in one swift movement, slices from tendon to tendon. The skin from his wrist to his elbow flays open and blood begins to pour out immediately.

Koujaku is the first person to react.

  
He sits up in a panic, and then Aoba shouts. Koujaku lunges toward Noiz, but Noiz grabs his knife too, and then holds it up defensively. Koujaku stops in his tracks, lest he wants to add another scar to his face. Aoba screams at the top of his lungs, “Noiz, no! What are you doing?!” and then rushes out of the room. 

You don’t do anything.

You can’t. You can’t seem to move at all. 

Maybe you’re in shock, but you sit back in your chair and watch the entire scene unfold. Noiz is shouting incoherently, Koujaku is trying to shout over him to calm him down, and Aoba is trying to shout over them both so that the emergency responders can hear him. You watch as Koujaku starts to crouch lower and lower, until he’s finally on his knees on the ground, looking up into Noiz’s eyes to beg him to put the knife down. He doesn’t.

He slices the same arm again, starting at the same point as the last, but he continues further up, almost to his shoulder. He cuts almost his entire arm open and then he screams at Koujaku that it doesn’t matter because he can’t feel it, so can’t he just leave him to die in peace?! Peace. You smile to yourself. Some peace would be nice.

Aoba says that an ambulance is coming. 

Noiz slices his other arm.

There’s blood everywhere. You’ve been through some violent times in your life, but you’ve never seen this much blood. The way it streams down Noiz’s arms and onto the table, then onto the floor, and then into his socks and into Koujaku’s kimono… it’s actually beautiful. It’s so dark against Noiz’s pale skin. You always liked Noiz’s skin. You liked the contrast between yours. Noiz is so beautiful, even with blood running down his arms.

He slices his neck.

He goes for his windpipe, but that’s when Koujaku intervenes.

He jumps up, his right forearm blocking the second knife Noiz stole from him. He screams out in agony as he rips the blade from Noiz’s throat, just barely keeping him from killing himself right then and there.

You throw up.

Koujaku somehow manages to ask if you’re okay, as he holds his right arm up in pain. Blood pours down it, just as it does on Noiz’s arms. Aoba manages to grab his arms and pin them behind Noiz’s back. He starts to kick and scream but Aoba is stronger than he is. He refuses to let go, and you pass out before the ambulance gets there.

 


End file.
